“Why must Theodore die?” I cried, staggering through them. “How will I kill him? Why does she mean more than him?” They receded before me, and I reached the pile of stones and started to climb after the Clockwork King. “Who would I not kill for her?” I shouted. But there was no answer.
Then there was fresh air upon my face, and the warmthless light before dawn. And the sounds and smoke of war.
I had chased the Clockwork King to a rooftop garden, a thick mechanical forest where evenly-spaced metal trees shadowed iron sod. The King staggered away from me, and I jumped upon him. He fell, spread out beneath me. We rolled over together, and brass arms fell upon my back, crushing me up against him.
“Why does no-one see the truth of Olympia but me?” I demanded. Roughly I tore the hood from the mirror that was his head. “How can I touch her, break her, to make her feel me?” His arms, embracing me, ground my ribs against each other and I could not breathe. Bleeding, feverish, drooling, my fingers scrabbled over smooth glass. “Why does love mean pain?” I gasped, and shattered the mirrored head of the Clockwork King, which was after all only a close-fitting helmet, and underneath was a human skull.
The skull said: “Can a shadow weigh desire in a scale, or a serpent measure art by a cord?” And then the Clockwork King fell back, and did not move, done in by the fatal question he could no longer keep from asking. His dead arms bound me, and for a time I lay atop him, drifting in and out of wakefulness, gunfire and organ music surging in my ears. I thought it odd that the question he could not answer was not, after all, unanswerable; then it seemed to me that he could not answer the question not because he did not know the answer, but because he did not dare to provide it. To ask it was to answer it. To answer it was to admit his ruin. Thus I had killed him with a question.
Then I was being pulled free of the corpse of the Clockwork King. I screamed as my flesh was torn again. But I opened my eyes, and I saw the glory that preceded the dawning sun, and saw who it was that had freed me, and then knew I was mad, mad beyond hope of return. “You,” I said. “Here.”
“Yes,” said Olympia. Did I love her? Or did I love only the image of her in my head? At that moment those two things collapsed into one. “I followed the automata when they retreated from the city,” she said. “For I am being chased.”
Behind her, climbing up the stone stairway from the Palace of Wheels-Within-Wheels, came Theodore. He had a new sword in hand, twin to his old one, which I still, somehow, held. “Ernst,” he said. “Stand aside.”
“No,” I said. He stepped forward, left hand out.
“Let us be reasonable,” he began.
I stabbed him through the heart.
He blinked, and stared at his own blade projecting from his chest. He whirled away, wrenching the sword from my hand. “Ah,” he said. “The Clockwork King . . . he said that I would perish here.” He fell to his knees, and then upon his side, and died looking no man in the eyes.
For a moment in the mechanical forest Olympia and I stood, silent. The powerful throb of the organ music made a strange harmony with the shelling and gunfire at the edge of the fair-ground. I took Olympia by the shoulders. “He is dead,” I said. “He was a thief and a killer and a seducer and maybe a rapist and a traitor, for all I know; but he was close enough to my soul as to be a part of me; and now he is dead.”
She said nothing. I stared at the light of dawn playing upon her face. Then I kissed her.
We fell to the ground, which was no longer metal but true forest land, and there were trees above us with birds singing to the accompaniment of the great organ, and fireworks exploding all around us, and the sun shining; and we were there together, and loved one another.
When I returned to myself it was past noon. Some noise had woken me from a sleep or daze. I sat up. I was still upon the roof of the palace, its metal soil, its artificial forest. What had happened? What had really happened, and what had been dementia? The Clockwork King was dead nearby. So was Theodore. But the metal of the place was unchanged. And Olympia was nowhere to be seen.
I looked over the edge of the palace. Living soldiers, wearing the colors of the Empress, were demolishing the city; having shelled it from a distance for some hours, they were now evidently brave enough to approach to complete its demolition. The automata, such as were intact, were everywhere immobile. I watched the soldiers awhile, feeling the pains of the past night; then I descended into the palace.
The Prodigy was asleep, curled up upon the seat of the organ. I woke him. He claimed he had played the organ all night, until he fell asleep; he thought that Kreisler had climbed into the pipes of the organ and never come out again. “He said something strange before he did, though,” the Prodigy told me. “He said, ‘Now I see the answer; I see the way by which the answer will come; sanity is, after all, madness, and our words are too small for the truth.’” I shook my head, and we left the palace.
Outside, the soldiers glanced at us, and went about their chores. We clearly were not the enemy. It was a grey day; high clouds had rolled in, and a thin rain fell.
I left the Prodigy with a colonel, to whom I gave instructions to see him carefully back to V—. I trudged through the city of the automata. Its every proud tower had been thrown down. Its jewels were scattered about in the mud underfoot; most of them quartz and pyrite.
I came to the gatehouse with the hall of mirrors. The hall was dim, lit by the dull light from outside, bereft of mystery. Only glittering shards upon the floor, throwing slivers of me back to myself, recalled what it had been.
Then I saw, in one corner, a single mirror untouched. Whole. And madness rushed full upon me again, and I put my hand upon the glass.
I said, “Can a shadow weigh desire in a scale, or a serpent measure art by a cord?”
And at what I saw then, I gasped aloud.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Matthew David Surridge is a freelance writer who lives in Montreal. He has written non-fiction for a number of venues, including The Comics Journal. His story “The Word of Azrael” is forthcoming from Black Gate.
THE ALCHEMIST’S FEATHER
Erin Cashier
I HAVE ALWAYS DONE as I have been told, and most of my actions have not been kind ones. I know because the Alchemist did not always tell me to forget and so, trapped inside my jar, I was cursed to remember.
I dreamt the dreams of dolls, and those were the times I could see the past most clearly. I remembered the time I crept inside a true man’s workplace to hide false evidence. And when I delivered a botched love potion into a poor serving girl’s tea and hid behind a jug of milk to watch as she retched black blood and green bile across the floor.
Tonight as I dreamt, I became aware that these were horrible things. They did not bother me at the time, and they do not bother me now, but I am aware of them in a way that I have never been before. And in the morning I realize one of my fingers is gone.
~ ~ ~
“I need more time,” the Alchemist protests, when the Prince’s latest emissary visits.
“You always need more time.” The emissary walks around the room with a curled lip and an arrogant eye, then picks up my jar and shakes it hard. I rattle around limp inside as I’ve been told to do.
“I’m getting closer.” The Alchemist holds up a small feather for the emissary to inspect. “This is a crow feather—”
“The Prince wants phoenix feathers. We can pick up crow feathers on any street in Vienna.”
“It is a process. You cannot just skip to the end and create a phoenix!”
“What use are crow feathers to the Prince?” The emissary takes the black curl of proof with his free hand. “I’ve seen better tricks on street corners.”
“This is not magic—it is alchemy!” the Alchemist protests and pounds a nearby table. Implements jump and a cloud of charcoal powder billows. “I cannot just paint feathers and make up a pretty story. Is that what the Prince wants?”
“The Prince wants the real thing,” the emissa
ry says, shaking my bottle roughly for emphasis. “But he would like it quickly. He’s paying you a lot of money. For your sake, and the sake of that rodent you call a servant, you’d better hurry.”
“My supplies are low—”
“You’ve got all you’ll get. Your next shipment will be your last. Either you can do it soon, or not at all.”
The Alchemist tilts his head and raises an eyebrow. “If the prince hadn’t put his sword into every whore in Vienna he wouldn’t need them so badly.”
“Treason does not become you, Alchemist. Finish it before his wedding day so that his ‘sword’ might be healed.” The emissary flicks the small feather at the Alchemist and it floats to the ground on a jagged path. He holds my jar tight and makes a show of thinking about its destruction before snorting and setting it down on the table, intact.
~ ~ ~
A night passes. Things happen. I am told to forget and I must obey.
~ ~ ~
“Play with the girl,” the Alchemist commands, releasing me from my jar at dawn. There are bread crumbs in his beard and bits of bacon in his teeth. He spills me onto his desk where the small black feather is now mated with a white one, both of them aligned side by side atop a research book full of symbols I cannot understand. I drop off the edge of the desk with a fall and a tumble, in the nature of small things, landing in a crumpled pile before picking myself up and setting off to find Maria.
Maria smiles at the sight of me, as I clamber up the end of her bed. I walk the hills of her slight body and she pinches her nose.
“You’re the smelliest doll ever, Alrun,” she informs me, and I know it is true because I’ve been given a nose. The lab was a sulfurous stinking place; not even the thickest cork could keep the scent out of my jar. “Shall we go outside now?” she asks and I nod.
Her stomach growls. “I’ll grab the crust, if he’s left any,” she says to herself and places me upon her shoulder.
With a rind of bread in tow, I sit on Maria’s shoulder as she trots along the path to reach a glade where our cabin’s smoke is unseen. In a fashionable city, no one would ever tolerate the stench that rises continually from the three fires he keeps lit. We’d been in a fashionable city, once. We’d had gold once, too. But those times are past. I have forgotten most of them because so much time has elapsed—newer memories crowd out the old ones in my small and wooden head.
That, and perhaps the things that were made to be my eyes were not so very good. I was ill-made, and I am falling apart at a prodigious rate. Today, another finger is lost.
“Shall we dance, Alrun?” Maria asks and I nod. She holds me out, one of my hands in each of her thumb and forefingers, and she twirls me around in the white-gold sun, singing a song of her own creation. She has a voice like the birds she sometimes protects me from, when a curious sparrow becomes too interested in the shiny bits that are my eyes or the gummed string that is my hair. She sings and spins until both her body and throat are tired and then winds down to set me in the pocket of her lap.
I am quiet while she weaves me skirts out of grass and makes tiny wreaths for my hair. She places one of these upon my head and I reach up to help her adjust it so that I can see past an ivory petal of a flower and she gasps.
“Another finger gone! I didn’t—”
I gesture that it wasn’t her doing.
“You’re sure?” she asks, and I nod strongly. “I wish you could tell me what happened.”
I don’t know what happened. I have been told to forget. Even if the Alchemist had carved lips for me, that could not change.
“I can make you new ones, I think.” She picks up pieces of twig and whittles them down with her fingernails, pinching off wooden strands.
I watch her silent concentration. How many girls have there been? Three, at least. Before that, I hadn’t bothered to count. But there was always one, a little girl, aged just eight or nine. What has become of the rest of them? I cannot remember these things, either.
But I think I like this one most. I don’t know why, precisely—maybe it’s because Maria has given me a name, something the Alchemist himself has never bothered to do. However, if the past is any indication, there will come a time when she is forgotten to me too.
And this, strangely, hurts. I stare at her, trying to imprint her particular face on my mind, to hide it someplace he could not take it from me. I see her truly now. The dirt that seams where her hair and skin meet, the bruises along her upper arm from his fearsome shaking, the cracked nails that even now become moreso as she embarks on the serious task of creating new fingers for me. She smiles, showing teeth like lines of the chalk the Alchemist uses to draw symbols on his bench, and passes me her efforts, two splinters of the right size and proportion to replace the fingers that I’ve lost.
I try to attach them but they fall off and down into the grasses below. Neither of us are Alchemists, it seems.
“I’m sorry about that, Alrun.”
I shrug. I am neither sorry nor sad. Not about this. Maria is just a girl, and I am only a doll.
~ ~ ~
We return later that night when it is too cold to stay out any longer, once the wolves begin to howl. The Alchemist is in his lab, and slightly fresher bread is out for Maria to gnaw on. She releases me from her skirt pocket and I creep alone back towards the laboratory and the jar that is my home.
I roll underneath the crack at the floor of the door. “I see you, homunculus,” the Alchemist says without looking. “Come here.” He points to an empty hearth. It is not like any of his hearths to ever be empty.
I make my way across the room, past the decanters and condensers that are his craft and obsession, until I reach the hearth’s entrance.
“Inside with you,” he says and I am compelled forward. “And into the jar.”
I do as I am told, like always.
~ ~ ~
I wake to find another finger gone. I am down to just my forefinger and thumb, and it will be very hard to climb up Maria’s bedding if this continues. But she’s already awake and waiting for me when I come into her room.
“Alrun!” she says, and sinks down to my level on the floor, taking her blankets with her. It has snowed during the night and for all the fires in the laboratory, the rest of the cabin is cold. “Alrun—last night was freezing,” she begins, as she takes me up to her chest. She moves her lips to be near my delicately carved ears. “Alrun, I crept out last night, to sleep near the door to the laboratory, where it’s warmer. And as I lay down, I could see between the slats of the door, Alrun. He’s got a bird in there somewhere. A peacock. A baby peacock.” The next sound I hear is that of her licking her lips. “Do peacocks taste good? I’m sure they do. Have you seen it?”
There was a peacock feather that morning on the desk, the same size as the other two, the crow and the unknown white one. I recognize the peacock’s colors from their pictures in his studies, green and purple and black. Maria takes my thoughtful silence for negation and sighs. I settle in between her ribs through the thin shift she wears. “I was hoping it wasn’t a dream.”
I nod. This is something I understand now, too. My recent dreams have the feel of memories. I genuinely hope they are not.
~ ~ ~
Maria naps. She sleeps more these days. I vaguely remember the others, sleeping more, near the end of my memories of them. I find myself wishing that I had made more of an effort at the time to remember. What will happen to Maria, when she is gone? Will those memories fade as well? What can I do to not forget?
I creep into the lab. The Alchemist is asleep across his desk, his verdigris-stained quill tossed to one side. I use him as a ladder and come to the place where his beard meets the manuscripts he drools upon. I spread the locks of his hair and find the proof beneath it, a feather no longer than the span of my palm. I take it and return to her and place it at the end of her bed. My Maria does not dream, and here is her proof.
~ ~ ~
That night, I am compelled anew. The Alchemist places
me into the jar himself and piles his mixtures around me, red, white, black, green.
“There. Now. It begins,” he says, and I have time to wonder, what? before it is over, and I wake to find myself inside my jar again, looking out at the world through its blurry glass. I wish that everything were so blurry for me. I know I have had dreams of past ills done. I have no need for the clarity of my nights.
Only my thumb remains.
~ ~ ~
I am playing with Maria when we hear wagon wheels crunch in the snow outside.
“Alrun!” Maria gasps. “Food!”
We fly from her room to hide at the door of the entrance to the cabin, where the Alchemist is speaking to two men. They hold a jar between them, huge and glass. There is no food in sight.
“It is not wide enough!” the Alchemist says. His hands are covered in red powder and he strangles the top of the jar with both his hands, leaving scarlet handprints behind.
The first and smaller of the men shrugs. “It’s been made to your specifications, just as we were told.”
“No, it has not. The top. It is not wide enough!” The Alchemist is angry. I feel Maria shrink away.
“Take it back—”
“The Prince said to tell you that this is your last chance,” the first man says.
“No—I ordered a jar as big as—”
“This is what you get,” says the second man. He’s quite a bit larger than the first, and larger than the Alchemist as well. “This is all you get. He said that, too.”
At this, the Alchemist flies into a rage. Maria creeps back down the hall to her room and we hear the sounds of his anger, pots clanking and dishes breaking. He is as volatile as the substances he seeks to create. But he never gets angry in his laboratory, so the kitchen is where his wrath explodes. The kitchen, and on my poor Maria. I leap out from her pocket, fall to the ground, and then crawl out through a deserted rat hole—rats having given up on finding food here long ago—to the outside world. I hear the men mutter to themselves as they climb back to their riding perch.
The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year One Page 18
