A quick knock made him turn. The knock repeated.
“Uh… hello?” he called. “Who is it?”
The door burst open and Alice rushed in with a tray of food. Click trotted in behind her. “You’re awake! Thank God!”
She set the tray on the table and caught Gavin in a hug that made him howl. She instantly released him. “I’m so sorry! I should have realized—when I stopped moving, everything started to hurt worse, too, and you’ve been asleep for a long time.”
He hobbled to an easy chair next to the table and, gritting his teeth, eased himself into it. Alice hovered over him, offering help, but he waved her away. Click jumped onto the bed and settled into a pillow, his phosphorescent eyes gleaming green.
“How long was I asleep?” Gavin asked.
“You were unconscious, not asleep.” Alice took up the chair opposite his. She wore a white blouse, a pale blue skirt, and a straw hat with peacock feathers on it. All of it made her look free and bright, and Gavin was so glad to see her. “It’s been three full days. I was so worried. I thought the smell of food might bring you out.”
The mention of the food brought his head around to it. There was tea and some kind of dumpling in a cream sauce and peppered roast pork and dark bread and cucumbers with onions. Gavin was ravenous, and, ignoring the pain, pulled the tray toward him so he could eat. The dumplings were stuffed with soft cheese, and the tender pork was seasoned perfectly. Alice took a paper packet from her pocket and handed him two pills from it.
“Take these,” she said. “They’ll help with the pain.”
He swallowed them and kept eating. “Where are we?”
“The mayor’s house. So much has happened, I don’t know where to begin.”
“The last thing I remember is singing on the train.”
She nodded. “Part of the dam held, so the river destroyed less than we feared—a section a quarter of a mile wide and about five miles long. We got nearly everyone within that zone to safety. We lost some people, but… almost everyone survived. Except the Gonta-Zalizniaks. They’re all missing, presumed dead. Their house was at the bottom of the valley, you know, and it’s completely underwater now. The river is returning to its original bed. Some of the city will be flooded permanently, but most of it can be reclaimed. We’re being hailed as heroes.”
“We are?” Gavin paused with a fork halfway to his mouth. “We destroyed the dam and killed a bunch of people.”
“That’s not the way the Ukrainians see it,” Alice said. “The dam fed power to their hated Cossack rulers, you see. We, on the other hand, rescued their children, led the Cossacks down to the horrible dam, blew it up, and swept them away forever. The mayor—his name is Serhiy Hrushevsky—has taken over the city. He’s a very nice man who used to be a professor at the Kiev Ecclesiastical Seminary but became mayor because he wanted to soften what the Cossacks were doing. His son Mykhailo is extremely intelligent as well and will probably succeed him in politics, and— Oh! I’m babbling. I’m just so relieved that you’re all right, darling.”
“I’m happy to see you, too,” he said. “But what next?”
“Well, once the whole story came out, Mayor Hrushevsky brought us here to rest and recover as honored guests. I cured the rest of the plague zombies in the city, which only made everyone even happier, and they want to have a city-wide ball in our honor.”
The medicine Alice had given him started to work, and Gavin’s muscles relaxed. “I’ve never been a hero before. I don’t know how to react.”
“I don’t either, to be honest. I’m letting Phipps handle most of it.”
“Phipps! I’d forgotten all about her. She’s still with us?”
“Oh yes.” Alice folded her arms. “She insists upon coming to China with us. Glenda has already slipped off, back for London. We haven’t heard from Simon, either.”
“And we won’t.” Gavin drained his teacup, then paused. “I have to say… I was hoping…”
Alice grew more serious. “For what?”
“That we might be able to search the laboratory in the Gonta-Zalizniak house. To see if they had found… you know.”
“I do know.” She reached across the table and took his flesh hand in her metal one. “We’ll find a cure. You have time yet, no matter what Dr. Clef thought. We will cure you, we will get married”—her voice began to choke—“and we will have lots of children who will get very, very tired of hearing the same stories of their parents’ adventures over and over again.”
“‘Aw, Dad, not that boring story about Feng at the dam again,’” Gavin said, trying to lighten the mood by imitating a child, except his own voice grew thick. “‘We’ve heard it a million times.’”
“Will they speak with an American accent, do you think? Or a proper English one?”
“Hey! There’s nothing wrong with a good Boston accent,” Gavin said, laughing now. Click raised his head. “Don’t forget that we perfected baked beans so you beefeaters could put them on toast.”
Alice was laughing too, and she dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “Good heavens. I haven’t even told you the best part.”
“There’s more?”
“The paraffin refineries are nowhere near the dam and weren’t touched. Mayor Hrushevsky is insisting we take all the oil we need. The Lady has been restored by his own men, and she is ready to fly when we are.”
Gavin spent three more days recovering. He tired easily and slept a great deal, though he insisted on spending as much time as possible on the Lady, which was tethered just above the mayor’s modest house. It was easier to rest amid the familiar, homey creak of wood and hemp. It also seemed to Gavin that the Lady was pleased to see him. The ship appeared to float more freely, hold herself more steadily when Gavin was aboard, though he didn’t say anything about this to Alice.
When Gavin checked the Lady’s workshop, he was gratified to find the metal project he’d been working on had been moved there from the train, and he spent some time fiddling with it. It was nice to work on something that wasn’t a weapon. The Impossible Cube was locked away in a cupboard. Alice, Gavin, and Phipps didn’t see any need to tell anyone else the particulars of how they had led everyone out of danger. The paradox generator, of course, had been destroyed along with the dam, though Gavin still felt a small twinge at its loss.
Dr. Clef’s notes about the danger of time, space, and energy were also gone, burned by Phipps. Gavin didn’t have the heart to tell her that he had read them and, with a clockworker’s precision, memorized every numeral and symbol. He didn’t intend to use the information, of course. After everything that had happened, it would be foolish in the extreme. Much more interesting to work on his little project.
Now that Gavin was out of danger, Alice set about playing the part of the baroness to the hilt, making speeches and attending parties. Phipps attended most of these events as well, moving easily among the people, pointedly making friends and contacts. Once Gavin had recovered sufficiently to travel—and appear in public—Mayor Hrushevsky declared an entire day of celebration for their send-off to China. He presented Gavin with a new outfit—white airman’s leathers. Gavin found he couldn’t speak.
The ball was both plain and lavish, all at once. Mayor Hrushevsky, a great shaggy man with a long dark beard, insisted that the party be held outdoors in the streets, so it was more like an all-day festival than a ball. The pall of Gonta-Zalizniak rule had lifted, and the people appeared brighter, more cheerful. Even the weather cooperated, granting them a bright, balmy day. Gavin heard Ukrainian music for the first time, and he was enchanted. Street bands and musicians played at nearly every street corner. The mayor opened up the city coffers, and free food was available from stalls every few feet. The electric lights had gone out with the dam, of course, but after sunset people put out lanterns of glass and of colored paper, tinting the city with a hundred lively hues. Alice and Gavin and Phipps wandered about the city, greeted with cheers and laughter wherever they went. They danced to the
music, and Gavin held Alice tightly as they whirled through the evening streets.
“Who knew that a cabin boy from Boston would travel so far?” he said to her. “I love you always.”
“And I love you always,” she replied.
When it was time to go, Gavin, Alice, and Phipps returned to the square in front of the mayor’s house and listened to a speech they didn’t understand in the slightest. They smiled and waved to the cheering crowd, Gavin in his new whites, Phipps in her formal reds, and Alice in a Ukrainian-style blouse and skirt, heavily embroidered with tiny cogs and wheels, made just for her by a dozen grateful Kievite women. Click and the automatons, repaired and shined for the occasion, made an honor guard as the trio ascended the ladder to the hovering Lady. The envelope’s curly endoskeleton glowed blue with power from the generator and its generous supply of paraffin oil. The cheers and applause buoyed them up to the starry sky, lifting Gavin’s spirit with every step. When they arrived on the deck, Gavin took the helm and Alice increased power to the generator. The glow intensified, and the ship ascended, higher and higher, until the city became flecks of color on black velvet. A cool breeze washed over him, mixing the scent of purity with the smell of paraffin exhaust. Click took up his usual spot, peering over the side of one gunwale, and the little automatons perched on the ropes or skittered about near Alice. Phipps folded her arms and watched. It was a thrill to be back in his rightful place, back in the air where he belonged.
And yet…
Once they established a heading east and the nacelle propellers were pushing them along, Gavin asked Phipps to take the helm for a moment. She arched a questioning eyebrow.
“I need to show Alice something below,” he said.
He led Alice down to the laboratory. She looked apprehensive. “It’s not anything bad,” he reassured her.
“You’re not going to propose again, are you?” she said. “I don’t really need—”
“It’s not that, either. I’m just… This is important to me, and I want you to be the first to see.”
Now she looked mystified. “All right.”
The little laboratory had been tidied up in preparation for the trip. Most of the floor space was taken up by a large, bulky object covered in a white cloth. Kemp’s head, the eyes still dark, sat on the worktable. Gavin hoped to figure out a way to restore him, but that wasn’t why he had brought Alice down. His heart was beating fast, and his palms were sweaty, though he couldn’t say why.
“I’ve finished it,” he said lamely. “It’s all done.”
It took her a moment to understand. Then she got it. “The project you started in the circus? That’s wonderful! I’m honored you want to show me, darling. Let’s see it.”
Gavin took a breath and whipped the cloth away. Alice gasped. The framework he had created spread out something like a kite. A battery pack with buckles and straps took up the center. The thousands of alloy rings he wound into a cloak now hung over the framework in waterfall ripples. When extended, they would stretch more than ten feet both left and right.
“Gavin!” Alice breathed. “Are those wings?”
AFTERWORD
The fun of writing semihistorical fiction is the ability to pick and choose interesting pieces of history while ignoring or altering anything that doesn’t suit the story. I will no doubt be excoriated by historians both amateur and professional who want to point out that the incandescent lightbulb wasn’t widely used until at least 1885, nearly thirty years after The Doomsday Vault and The Impossible Cube, or that the first paraffin oil (kerosene) refinery was constructed in Poland in 1859, not in Ukraine by 1858. Of course, such people ignore semi-intelligent windup cats, talking mechanical valets, and artificial limbs made of brass.
For the record, the Consolatrix Afflictorum is a real statue of the Virgin Mary in Luxembourg, and local legend has it that she fell out of a tree trunk in 1624, right around the time the bubonic plague struck the region. The stories say her touch cured a number of the afflicted, and so many people came to visit her shrine outside the city that in the late 1790s, the statue was moved to the Church of Our Lady (Notre Dame) inside the city walls.
Also in reality, Nicolas Adames was made vicar of that church in 1863. Gavin and Alice visit Vicar Adames in 1858, so perhaps in our fictional reality, Adames’s predecessor died of the clockwork plague and granted him an early promotion.
In the historical 1870, Adames was named Bishop of Luxembourg, and the Church of Our Lady became Notre Dame Cathedral. I like to think it happened in fiction, too.
Ukraine has a long and sad history. Her rich farmlands made her a target for emperors who wanted to feed their armies, and she has at various times been overrun by Russians, Poles, Mongols, and Germans. In the 1700s, in both reality and in this work of fiction, Ukraine was divided in half by Russia and Poland. (Many modern people have forgotten—or never knew—that Poland was once a world-class military power.) Russia and Poland were far from kind in their rule, and in 1768, Maksym Zalizniak and Ivan Gonta led a Cossack rebellion against their oppressors. In history, they slaughtered the Poles and took over right-bank (western) Ukraine right handily. Afraid that the rebellion would spread to left-bank (eastern) Ukraine, Empress Catherine of Russia flooded the area with troops. Ivan Gonta was captured and chopped into fourteen pieces so his remains could be displayed in fourteen different towns as a deterrent to further uprisings. Maksym Zalizniak was captured and tortured but managed to escape with fifty-one of his men. He vanished, and his final fate remains unknown. Both men became national heroes, the subject of numerous Ukrainian folktales and songs.
In my fictional world, the clockwork plague arrived just before the rebellion, thanks to Dr. Clef and the Impossible Cube, so Ivan Gonta and Maksym Zalizniak were rather more successful. Although it would have been easy to have the downtrodden Ukrainians create a utopia for themselves, I was forced to remember that the rebellion was fomented by eighteenth-century Cossacks, who weren’t known for their tolerance or compassion. Fortunately, Ukraine has at last regained her independence, both in modern reality and in my semihistorical fiction, and with it, perhaps she can regain her former glory as well.
—Steven Harper
Read on for an excerpt from the next
thrilling novel of the Clockwork Empire,
THE DRAGON MEN
Coming November 2012 from Roc
“I still think this is a terrible idea,” said Alice.
Gavin spread his mechanical wings, furled them, and spread them again. He shrugged at Alice’s words and shot a glance across the deck at Susan Phipps, who set her jaw and tightened her grip on the helm. Her brass hand, the one with six fingers, gleamed in the afternoon sun and a stray flicker of light caught Gavin in the face. The world slowed, shaving time into transparent slices, and for one of them he felt trillions of photons ricochet off his skin and carom away in rainbow arcs. His mind automatically tried to calculate trajectory for them, and the numbers spun and swirled in an enticing whirlpool. He bit his lip and forced himself out of it. There were more important—more exciting—issues at hand.
“I completely agree,” Phipps said. “But he’s the captain of the ship, and he can do as he likes, even if it’s idiotic.”
“Captains are supposed to listen to common sense,” Alice replied in tart British tones. “Especially when the common sense comes from someone with a decent amount of intelligence.”
At that Gavin had to smile. A soft breeze spun itself across the Caspian Sea, winding across the deck of the Lady of Liberty to stir his pale blond hair. He started to count the strands that flicked across his field of vision, note the way each one was lifted by the teamwork of gas particles, then bit his lip again. Damn it, he was getting more and more distractible by minutiae. More and more individual details of the world around him beckoned—the drag of the harness on his back, the creak of the airship’s wooden deck, the borders of the shadow cast by her bulbous silk envelope high overhead, the sharp smell of the exhaust exud
ed from the generator that puffed and purred on the decking, the gentle thrumming of the propellered nacelles that pushed the Lady smoothly ahead, the shifting frequency of the blue light reflected by the Caspian Sea gliding past only a few yards beneath the Lady’s hull. Sometimes it felt like the world was a jigsaw puzzle of exquisite jewels, and he needed to examine each piece in exacting detail.
“Gavin?” Alice’s worried voice came to him from far away, and yanked him back to the ship. “Are you there?”
Damn it. He forced his grin back to full power. “Yeah. Sure. Look, I’ll be fine. Everything’ll work. I’ve been over the machinery a thousand times, and I’ve made no mistakes.”
“Of course not.” Alice’s expression was tight. “Clockworkers never make mistakes with their inventions.”
Gavin’s grin faltered again and he shifted within the harness. She was worried about him, and that thrilled and shamed him both. It was difficult to stand next to her and not touch her, even to brush against her. Just looking at her made him want to sweep her into his arms, something she allowed him to do only sporadically.
“Alice, will you marry me?” he blurted out.
She blinked at him. “What?”
“Will you marry me?” Words poured out of him. “I started to ask you back in Kiev, but we got interrupted, and what with one thing and another, I never got the chance to ask again, and now there’s a small chance I’ll be dead, or at least seriously wounded, in the next ten minutes, so I want to know: Will you marry me?”
“Oh, good Lord,” Phipps muttered from the helm.
“I… I… Oh, Gavin, this isn’t the time,” Alice stammered.
He took both her hands in his. Adrenaline thrummed his nerves like cello strings. Alice’s left hand was covered by an iron spider that wrapped around her forearm, hand, and fingers to create a strange metal gauntlet, and the spider’s eyes glowed red at his touch. Gavin had his own machinery to contend with—the pair of metal wings harnessed to his back. They flared again when he shifted his weight.
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