by Pearl North
Likely, she should not have kissed Clauda in the first place. As delightful as it had been, this past day had, in a sense, taken place under false pretenses. Once she knew that Selene’s blundering had lost both Po and the pen and doomed them all, would Clauda want anything to do with her anymore?
More distractions. Clauda had told her the entire, wild story about her adventure between worlds. The very least Selene could do was give her an honest accounting of her own activities during their separation.
She gently extricated herself from Clauda’s arms, dried her eyes, and proceeded to tell Clauda everything—the trip to the Corvariate Citadel, the pen, Mab, and how both Po and the pen were lost in an eyeblink. “I should have recognized Mab for who she was,” she concluded.
Clauda sighed. “Stop it. Please. I can’t stand to hear you torture yourself anymore. Come here.” Clauda held her arms out.
Selene blinked. “I don’t deserve your com—”
Clauda pulled Selene to her and kissed her on the lips. For a moment, Selene’s whole world was a swirl of lush softness. And then the kiss broke. “Ah, wha—?”
“Well, that shut you up, anyway.”
This close, Selene could see the flecks of gold in Clauda’s eyes.
“You don’t know yourself, Selene. You fault your virtues and exalt your flaws. Look how long it took you to kiss me. I suppose you felt you were exercising proper self-control all the time, too.”
“Yes. And you’re right. That was stupid of me, too.”
“I’m not trying to give you more ammunition against yourself. I’m asking you to accept that you’re not the best judge of your own behavior. I think you should let me take over that job for you.”
Selene sighed and relaxed a little more, leaning into Clauda. “Okay. I’ll try, but don’t be surprised if I…”
* * *
Listening to Selene recount her tale in a flat voice, with her face forced into expressionlessness, was excruciatingly painful. Of course Selene would take all the blame on herself, despite the fact that she’d counseled the others not to trust Mab. Finally she fell asleep in mid-self-recrimination. “Don’t be surprised if I…”
Selene’s words trailed off as her head drooped and she began to list sideways. Clauda grabbed her around the shoulders and pulled her close, then eased her down onto the bedroll.
Selene murmured something at the shift in position, and then sank deeper into sleep. Clauda pulled the blanket up over her and brushed a few stray hairs from her face. She trailed one finger down the side of Selene’s face, from her prominent cheekbone down the long, sloping curve of her jaw. She caught herself and pulled her hand away.
Poor Selene. Always blaming herself for everything. Even in sleep, she had a vertical crease between her brows. Clauda wondered what it would take to make that worry line go away. Too tired to search for answers, she settled for lying down beside Selene and drifting off to sleep.
* * *
Selene awoke with Clauda fast asleep beside her, her head pillowed in the crook of Selene’s arm. Clauda’s coppery brown hair tickled Selene’s nose, and for a moment Selene forgot about the pen and her mother and Po, and simply relished the moment. She was supremely uncomfortable, which somehow made it easier to allow herself to enjoy Clauda’s warm proximity. Her arm was numb from the weight of Clauda’s head resting on it; she had a full bladder; and any moment now, the stray, curly hairs brushing against her nose would make her sneeze. But Clauda was warm, and alive, and she must have pulled this blanket up over Selene when she … when had she fallen asleep, anyway?
Clauda opened her eyes, smiled, pulled Selene down for a kiss, and said, “Let’s go see about the wing.”
* * *
Half of the wing’s right wing was buried in the ground. The nose had uprooted several sizeable trees, which now lay across it, pinning it to the ground. But the vessel itself appeared undamaged. “We’ll need block and tackle to get it free, I’m afraid. We need to go back to the Libyrinth and get help.”
Clauda nodded. She patted the gold flank of the wing. Selene saw tears in her eyes and turned away, but not before she heard Clauda murmur, “I won’t forget you. I promise.”
Later that day as she and Clauda sat astride Goliath, making their way toward home, Selene asked, “Is the wing alive?”
“Well, it’s not just a machine. There’s a … mind of sorts. It has memories and feelings.”
“How is that possible?”
“I don’t know. It’s a creation of the Ancients. Anything’s possible, with them.”
For several miles they were silent, and then Clauda said, “So what happened to Po?”
“No one really knows,” said Selene. “Most of us think Thela used the pen to whisk him back to Ilysies with her.”
“But if she has the pen and it can do all you say it does, wouldn’t she be doing a lot more with it? Things we’d, you know, notice?”
“I know. Hilloa thinks Po is using his kinesiology to prevent her from using it.”
“Can he do that?”
“I don’t know,” said Selene. “He’d been through some pretty intense stuff. Mind-lancet attacks.”
Clauda inhaled sharply.
“Right. Do you ever wonder if what you endured made it possible for you to bond with the wing the way you have?”
Clauda frowned. “I never really thought about it.”
“That was Po’s theory.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway, Hilloa thinks Po is with Thela and she, Baris, and Jan have taken off, without permission, to rescue him.”
“They could get into trouble.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe we should go after them.”
“Vorain already has. Besides, I want to get you back to the Libyrinth, safe and sound, before anything else happens.”
“No.”
“What?”
“You’re not taking me back to the Libyrinth. I’m coming with you to Ilysies.” Clauda grinned. “It’ll be just like old times.”
10
The Clockmaker General
They wanted to separate them right there at the Department of Compensation, but Haly refused. “No, I will go with him to the facility. I want to see for myself what this place is like.”
The chair readily agreed. “Fine. You will perform your duties with a settled mind if you see for yourself.” She turned to the man with a train on his hat. “Summon another tollkeeper to escort them.” She hesitated. “No, make that two.”
Two more tollkeepers, both attired similarly to their tollkeeper, but taller, arrived in short order and took Haly and Gyneth out of the Department of Compensation and loaded them onto the tollkeeper’s conveyance. They rattled through the city until they reached the outskirts. There a complex of low, single-story buildings sprawled in the middle of an open square bordered by an iron fence. The buildings were red brick, with small windows.
Two women dressed in black skirts and waistcoats stood at the gate bearing rifles. “State your business,” the one on the left said.
“Citizen guardians, we bring a new inmate, and an … observer.”
“An observer?”
The tollkeeper explained the situation.
“Well, this is highly irregular,” said one of the guards when he’d finished. “We don’t normally admit anyone who isn’t here to work.”
“Here is the order from the Board of Compensation,” said the tollkeeper.
She looked the written order over and showed it to her compatriot, who also read it. “Very well,” said the latter, folding it and putting it in her pocket.
They opened the gate and admitted them. “We will show you your sleeping quarters first,” said the tollkeeper.
They drove to one of the buildings; it was impossible to tell how it was distinguished from any of the others. Inside, rows of beds filled a long room and at each end were bathrooms. The beds were tidy, the mattresses a bit thin but actually quite a bit better than most of those at
the Libyrinth.
Next they visited the dining hall. It was similar to the one at the Libyrinth: rows of long tables and benches stretched from one end of the room to the other. “How has your food supply been?” Haly asked the chair.
“Fine. The clockmaker provides us with all we need.” The guard looked less than thrilled about that.
What was going on? Thesia had been in straits just as dire as the rest of them. But now everyone acted as if they’d never been out of food. And while it was true that the Thesians had always had a mechanical turn of mind, they’d never amassed this concentration of gizmos in one place before. It was as if this were a Thesia with a different past than the one Haly knew to have existed.
At last they went to the work buildings.
“These are the forges,” said the chair, pointing to a row of square structures with steel doors. Even from where they stood they could feel the heat. When one of the workers opened one of the doors, Haly took a step back.
“Don’t worry,” said the chair. “He won’t be working the forges. Smelting is only for the experienced.”
Lucky them, Haly thought.
The workroom was filled with the clang of metal on metal, the hiss of steam as red-hot brass was plunged into water to cool. “What are they making?” asked Haly as she observed a woman hammering a glowing strip of metal until it seemed as thin as a page of a book. The worker curled each end over to produce a loop, and then slid the strip into a long trough of water to cool.
“Springs,” said the chair.
They moved past the metalworkers to another area. Here people trod a large treadmill, turning a winch connected to a metal rod with a slot in it. Workers took the cooled strips of metal and threaded them onto the rod. The loops held them in place. The strips were also slotted into another rod on a frame that ran in tracks on the floor. As the winch turned the one rod, it coiled the strips of metal upon themselves in tight spirals, pulling the rolling rack ever closer. Once the springs were wound, they were secured with a cable threaded through the loop and wound around the spring, attached to the loop again. After that, workers pulled them off the winding rod and sealed them in flat metal canisters.
Just as one of the workers was taking a wound spring from the end of the winding rod, the center anchor loop snagged and the whole spring came undone, uncoiling with such force that it struck the man and threw him across the room where he lay, limp and motionless. Another worker who’d been standing nearby was hit by the other end of the uncoiling spring. She held her hands to her face. Blood dripped from between her fingers.
“This is the most hazardous part of the process,” said the chair, with calm understatement. “Apart, of course, from delivering the wound springs and mounting them in their stations.”
“Gyneth can smelt,” Haly said.
* * *
She said goodbye to him at the gate. “Be careful,” she told him.
“You too. At least in my case, we know what the hazards are.”
“I’ll be back for you soon,” she said, and left before she gave in to the urge to cling to him.
She climbed onto the tollkeeper’s conveyance and sat down beside the chair. They clattered down the street and across the square. They came to a halt outside the clock tower.
Haly couldn’t say why, but just looking at the building made her hands sweat. She stared, trying to figure out what it was about the place that troubled her so.
The other occupants of the conveyance sat staring at her. “Well,” said the chair. “This is it.”
“But aren’t you going to take me inside and present me?”
“No.”
The chair and the tollkeeper both looked tense. The tollkeeper tapped his fingers against the wheel, as if barely containing the impulse to drive away.
“Go on,” said the chair.
Thinking of Gyneth in the compensation facility, Haly disembarked from the conveyance and advanced toward the building. The closer she got to it, the deeper her fear became. It was an effort just to climb the steps. Haly couldn’t explain it, but she felt as if she approached something so awful it would drive her mad just to lay eyes upon it. Whatever lay beyond that door, she did not want anything to do with it.
But Gyneth toiled in the spring factory and if she did not do as she was told she’d never get him out of there. She forced herself across the portico and she opened the door.
Inside the building it was musty and dim. The only light was what filtered down from the skylights in the dome above. She heard a ticking sound and looked up. The center of the dome opened up into the spire that reached for the sky. Gears the size of small houses rotated in stately progression, interlocking with pinions and driveshafts. A pendulum that appeared to be made of solid gold swung back and forth.
Just as the dome of the Great Hall back home at the Libyrinth had images of the Seven Tales spaced about it, so, too, did this dome, only here a clock hand, curved to skim the dome, pointed at the hour of the Fly.
In the middle of the rotunda sat a figure in a chair, and a small table with some books on it. A few paces away stood a harpsichord. Haly’s footsteps echoed in counterpoint to the ticking of the clock as she approached.
The figure didn’t move. Haly stared at it. She had never seen, nor read or heard, of anything like this. The … person, she supposed it must be, was humanoid, but so ancient it didn’t seem possible that she—or he—could still be alive. And yet the eyes that stared back at her from their deeply recessed sockets gleamed with life. They reminded her of Prime Censor Orrin’s eyes, only if the late leader of the Singer priesthood had been old, this person was … ancient.
A nose like a beak stuck out over lips withered to a flat, blue-black line. Cheekbones, brow, and chin stood out in sharp relief from the sunken cheeks and eye sockets. The skin was a rich golden brown, deeply lined. It made Haly think of a wood carving.
And that was only the face. There was so much more: the elaborate headdress like a pointed arch, the bits of foil and colored paper and plastic wound into the long, white dreadlocks. The clothing, a hodgepodge of every style Haly had ever seen, either here or from Old Earth books, all jumbled together layer upon layer as if she—he—never took anything off, but just kept adding. It made Haly wonder if there was a body at all, under all those vests and coats and frocks.
One hand, skeletal and lined, rested on the chair. The other arm ended above the elbow, where a jagged metal strut stuck out from the combined sleeves of an opera gown, a frock coat, a T-shirt, and a flannel suit.
So maybe this wasn’t a human being after all. Was it a device of the Ancients? Whatever the being was, it was obviously intelligent and Haly was being incredibly rude, standing here gawking. She bowed and said, “Good morning, Clockmaker. I’m Halcyon. You wanted to see me.”
The lips parted and a female voice at once faint and hoarse said, “Well, look at you.” Her teeth were encrusted with wires and gems. “You’re not like the others, are you?”
Haly shook her head. She thought she’d come to terms with being different, thought she’d accepted her odd origins and her unique abilities, but now she felt like a specimen under a microscope, horribly exposed, and afraid of something she could not even name.
“There’s something funny about you,” the clockmaker went on. “A little bit of you curls around and extends beyond cube space.” She sniffed. “Are you an imp?”
Haly sat up. “Imp? You mean, like the Nods?” Her heart pounded. Dread overcame her at what she might be about to discover.
The clockmaker sniffed again and shook her head. “No, not an infrastructure maintenance pod, though there’s a little bit of imp in you, isn’t there? Hmm. I bet that gives you some unusual abilities.”
“For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard the voices of the books. Only since the Redemption, it’s only when I concentrate on a book. Now, I hear the Song.”
“Yes, that makes sense. Your imp bits make you more aware of The Song That Changed Us than yo
ur meat puppet peers. Maybe you can help me.” A long sigh escaped her. “I’m stuck. And that boy took my pen.”
“Stuck? You mean in that chair? Can you walk?”
The clockmaker shook her head. “Didn’t bother having legs made. What was the point?”
“Made? Then … this isn’t your real body? Your original body?”
The truncated arm jerked up and a whirring sound came from somewhere under the sleeve. “What do you think, you stupid meat puppet?”
Haly was taken aback, at both the words and their vicious tone. Suddenly several aspects of the situation combined and … rotated, giving her a whole new view: the clockmaker’s age, her statement about being “stuck,” her reference to a pen, and Gyneth’s observations about Time and the people who walk “sideways” in it. “You’re the last Ancient,” she said.
“What, do you want a prize for figuring that out?”
Haly realized that what she saw told her next to nothing about this being. She existed mostly outside of the spaces Haly could see, smell, hear … and yet … “You’re not just stuck in that chair. You’re trapped here,” she said. “When Po used kinesiology to try to free you, it didn’t work.”
“Not all the way,” said Endymion. “I thought I could get out through the hole in this world, but I wound up here instead, fifty years in the past. And now the hole is closed again. Damn imp.” She looked about her. “Do you like what I’ve done with the place? I was in the mood for some steampunk.” She grinned. It was a ghastly sight. “I am so bored. I want to die, like my friends all did. I was afraid, but Jane was right. I wish I could have gone with them.”
“The others … your friends … the other Ancients?”
“That’s right. Let me show you.” On a table at her right, the side her good arm was on, sat a stack of books.
She picked up the book on the top of the stack. It was not like most books Haly was used to seeing. It was wider than it was high, and the covers were thick. She focused on it, and was surprised to hear nothing at all.
