The laboratory was in a disarray so complete that it might never be restored to order. Glass glimmered in piles of dust, shattered tubes and broken beakers were smeared with the shining residue of the blue-green substance that lived and glowed in the dark. It spilled and died, losing its luminescence with every passing second—and there was the doctor, his hand held aloft and his lamp bathing the chaos with revelation.
Madeline turned away from him, standing close enough beneath the lamp so that her shadow did not temper its light. Her feet twisted on the glass-littered floor, cutting her toes and leaving smears of blood.
She demanded, “Where are you?”
She was answered by the tapping of marching feet, but it was a sound that came from all directions at once. And with it came a whisper, accompanied by the grinding discourse of a metal jaw.
“Tan...gles. Tan...gles...feet. Tanglefoot.”
“That’s your name then? Little changeling—little Tanglefoot? Come out here!” she fired the command into the corners of the room and let it echo there. “Come out here, and I’ll send you back to where you came from! Shame on you, taking a boy’s friend. Shame on you, binding his feet and tormenting his master!”
Tanglefoot replied, “Can...op...en...er” as if it explained everything, and Edwin thought that it might—but that it was no excuse.
“Ted, where are you?” he pleaded, tearing his eyes away from Madeline and scanning the room. Upstairs he could hear the pounding thunder of footsteps—of orderlies and doctors, no doubt, freshly roused by the night nurse in her chamber. Edwin said with a sob, “Madeline, they’re coming for you.”
She growled, “And I’m coming for him.”
She spied the automaton in the same second that Edwin saw it—not on the ground, marching its little legs in bumping patterns, but overhead, on a ledge where the doctor kept books. Tanglefoot was marching, yes, but it was marching towards them both with the doctor’s enormous scissors clutched between its clamping fingers.
“Ted!” Edwin screamed, and the machine hesitated. The boy did not know why, but there was much he did not know and there were many things he’d never understand...including how Madeline, fierce and barefoot, could move so quickly through the glass.
The madwoman seized the doctor’s hurricane lamp by its scalding cover, and Edwin could hear the sizzle of her skin as her fingers touched, and held, and then flung the oil-filled lamp at the oncoming machine with the glittering badger eyes.
The lamp shattered and the room was flooded with brilliance and burning.
Dr. Smeeks shrieked as splatters of flame sprinkled his hair and his nightshirt, but Edwin was there—shuffling fast into the doctor’s sleeping nook. The boy grabbed the top blanket and threw it at the doctor, then he joined the blanket and covered the old man, patting him down. When the last spark had been extinguished he left the doctor covered and held him in the corner, hugging the frail, quivering shape against himself while Madeline went to war.
Flames were licking along the books and Madeline’s hair was singed. Her shift was pocked with black-edged holes, and she had grabbed the gloves Dr. Smeeks used when he held his crucibles. They were made of asbestos, and they would help her hands.
Tanglefoot was spinning in place, howling above their heads from his fiery perch on the book ledge. It was the loudest sound Edwin had ever heard his improvised friend create, and it horrified him down to his bones.
Someone in a uniform reached the bottom of the stairs and was repulsed, repelled by the blast of fire. He shouted about it, hollering for water. He demanded it as he retreated, and Madeline didn’t pay him a fragment of attention.
Tanglefoot’s scissors fell to the ground, flung from its distracted hands. The smoldering handles were melting on the floor, making a black, sticky puddle where they settled.
With her gloved hands she scooped them up and stabbed, shoving the blades down into the body of the mobile inferno once named Ted. She withdrew the blades and shoved them down again because the clockwork boy still kicked, and the third time she jammed the scissors into the little body she jerked Ted down off the ledge and flung it to the floor.
The sound of breaking gears and splitting seams joined the popping gasp of the fire as it ate the books and gnawed at the ends of the tables.
“A blanket!” Madeline yelled. “Bring me a blanket!”
Reluctantly, Edwin uncovered the shrouded doctor and wadded the blanket between his hands. He threw the blanket to Madeline.
She caught it, and unwrapped it enough to flap it down atop the hissing machine, and she beat it again and again, smothering the fire as she struck the mechanical boy. Something broke beneath the sheet, and the chewing tongues of flame devoured the cloth that covered Tanglefoot’s joints—leaving only a tragic frame beneath the smoldering covers.
Suddenly and harshly, a bucket of water doused Madeline from behind.
Seconds later she was seized.
Edwin tried to intervene. He divided his attention between the doctor, who cowered against the wall, and the madwoman with the bleeding feet and hair that reeked like cooking trash.
He held up his hands and said, “Don’t! No, you can’t! No, she was only trying to help!” And he tripped over his own feet, and the pile of steaming clockwork parts on the floor. “No,” he cried, because he couldn’t speak without choking. “No, you can’t take her away. Don’t hurt her, please. It’s my fault.”
Dr. Williams was there, and Edwin didn’t know when he’d arrived. The smoke was stinging his eyes and the whimpers of Dr. Smeeks were distracting his ears, but there was Dr. Williams, preparing to administer a washcloth soaked in ether to Madeline’s face.
Dr. Williams said to his colleague, a burly man who held Madeline’s arms behind her back, “I don’t know how she escaped this time.”
Edwin insisted, “I did it!”
But Madeline gave him a glare and said, “The boy’s as daft as his mother. The clockwork boy, it called me, and I destroyed it. I let myself out, like the witch I am and the fiend you think I must be—”
And she might’ve said more, but the drug slipped up her nostrils and down her chest, and she sagged as she was dragged away.
“No,” Edwin gulped. “It isn’t fair. Don’t hurt her.”
No one was listening to him. Not Dr. Smeeks, huddled in a corner. Not Madeline, unconscious and leaving. And not the bundle of burned and smashed parts in a pile beneath the book ledge, under a woolen covering. Edwin tried to lift the burned-up blanket but pieces of Ted came with it, fused to the charred fabric.
Nothing moved, and nothing grumbled with malice in the disassembled stack of ash-smeared plates, gears, and screws.
Edwin returned to the doctor and climbed up against him, shuddering and moaning until Dr. Smeeks wrapped his arms around the boy to say, “There, there. Parker, it’s only a little fire. I must’ve let the crucible heat too long, but look. They’re putting it out now. We’ll be fine.”
The boy’s chest seized up tight, and he bit his lips, and he sobbed.
A Serpent in the Gears
Margaret Ronald
MARGARET RONALD is the author of Spiral Hunt, Wild Hunt, and Hunt’s End (forthcoming), as well as a number of short stories. She is an alumna of the Viable Paradise workshop, a member of BRAWL, and a guest blogger at the Magic District (magicdistrict.wordpress.com). Originally from rural Indiana, she now lives outside Boston and blogs irregularly at mronald.wordpress.com. She is not yet weary of these quite vexing serpents on this quite vexing dirigible. She notes that the following story “started out with the character of the Professora (inspired by a friend’s Spirit of the Century game) and was originally an excuse to write something lighthearted and silly, full of adventure, derring-do, and nice hot cups of tea. I didn’t expect how much it would take on a life of its own, nor how deeply I’d fall in love with the world and characters. I kept having the feeling that the grand narrative of this setting was already fully formed somewhere, and that this story was
just one small fragment of it. Someday I hope to find out more about this world and what happens to these three characters in particular.”
WE UNEARTHED THE serpent’s corpse just before the Regina reached the first gun emplacement that separated the greater world from the forgotten valley of Aaris. The reports from villagers on the border had placed the serpent half a day out of our chosen path and much higher than the dirigible should have been, and while the Regina’s captain grumbled about “sightseeing” expeditions, she agreed to let us send up a dinghy.
Truth was, captain and crew alike had signed on for the story as much as for the Royal Society’s generous pay. The Aaris valley—forgotten mainly because just after the first isolation guns were erected, the Great Southern rail line obviated the need to venture near the Sterling Pass—was a story even jaded ‘nauts revered. A side trip such as this only added savor to the tale. Indeed, the same villagers who’d informed us of the serpent’s presence had already traded well on this news: a desiccated carcass halfway up one of the snowcapped peaks that made the Sterling Pass all but untraversable, only revealed by the spring thaw.
“Thaw, my arse,” Colonel Dieterich muttered as we disembarked from the gently bobbing dinghy. “It’s cold enough to freeze a thaumaturge’s tits off.”
“The villagers said that this is the first time it’s been warm enough to spend more than an hour on the slopes, sir,” I said, and draped his greatcoat around his shoulders, avoiding the creaking points of his poorly fastened andropter. “For them I suppose that would constitute a thaw.”
“For them having ten toes is a novelty.” He snorted his pipe into a greater glow, then noticed the coat. “Ah. Thank you, Charles. Come on; let’s go see what the barbaric snows have brought us.”
The doctors Brackett and Crumworth were already wandering over the carcass, pointing and exclaiming. All of the Royal Society party (excluding Professora Lundqvist, who because of her condition could not leave the Regina) were in better spirits now than they had been for weeks, and I began to understand the captain’s decision to send us up here. Unusual as the moment of domestic accord was, though, it paled in comparison to the serpent.
The thing had the general shape of a Hyborean flying serpent, though it was at least twenty times the length of most specimens. It stretched out at least fifty feet, probably more, since the sinuous curves of the carcass obscured its true dimensions. It had no limbs to speak of, though one of the anatomists waved excitedly at shattered fins and shouted for us to come see. “Yes, yes, fins, any idiot can see that,” grumbled Dieterich. “Of course it had to have fins, how else could it steer? What interests me more are these.”
He nudged a pile of detritus with the end of his cane. Rotten wood gave under the pressure: old casks, long since broached. “Cargo, sir?” I said, hoping the possibility of commerce into Aaris might distract him from the carcass. “We may be able to figure out what they held.”
“Bugger the casks, Charles. No, look at the bones.” He knelt, cursing the snow and the idiocy of interesting specimens to be found at such a damnfool altitude, and tugged a few dirty-white disks free of ice and mummified flesh. “If these weren’t obviously bones, I’d swear they were gears.”
“I don’t see how—” I began uneasily, but a shout farther down the hillside drew his attention. Crumworth had found what would prove to be a delicate ratchet-and-flywheel system, hooked into the beast’s spinal column. Abruptly the scientists shifted from a state of mild interest to feverish study, each producing more evidence from the carcass.
Made, some said, pointing to the clearly clockwork aspects of the skeleton. Born, said others, pointing to the harness and the undeniable organic nature of the carcass itself (the anatomist raising his voice the most on this subject). Myself, I considered the question irrelevant: the point was not whether the serpent had been hatched or constructed, but to what use it had been put and, more importantly, why it was here, on this side of the mountains from Aaris, outside the realm where it could conceivably have thrived.
It appeared to have carried a crew, though none of their remains were evident, and I could only assume they had survived the crash. I wondered whether they would have returned home over the mountains, or descended into the greater world—and if the latter, whether they would in time come home again. The thought was less comforting than I once had found it. I nudged a toothed segment with my foot and watched it tumble across the ice.
“What does your valet think, Dieterich?” one of the party called. “Since he’s taking his time looking at it.”
Dieterich paused. “Well, Charles? What do you think? Made or born?”
For a moment I considered answering “both” and confounding the lot of them, but such was neither the place of a valet nor for a man in my current situation. “I think,” I said after a moment, “that there is a very dark cloud two points west of us. I suggest we return to the Regina before a storm acquaints us with how this creature died.”
There was less argument after that, though Doctor Brackett and the anatomist insisted on bringing so many bones with us that the dinghy sagged dangerously. The results were presented over supper, and a detailed report made to Professora Lundqvist.
The Professora, of course, could not show emotion, but her tank bubbled in an agitated fashion, and her cortex bobbed within it. “I believe perhaps we have left the Sterling Pass closed for too long,” she said at last, the phonograph flattening her voice into dry fact.
I privately agreed.
In the morning, Professora Lundqvist insisted on taking the bones to the captain, and borrowed me for the purpose. I piled the serpent’s jawbone on her tank, secured the lesser fangs to her braking mechanism, and accompanied her up to the lift. Lundqvist, lacking either an andropter or the torso around which to fasten one, could not venture to the open decks, and thus we were limited to the helm room.
We found the captain, a small blonde woman with the gait of a bear and the voice of an affronted Valkyrie, pulling lens after lens from the consoles and giving orders to the helmsman-automaton. “Captain, if I might have a word,” the Professora said.
“We don’t have time for more of your eggheads’ interpersonal crises,” the captain said without turning around. “I chose my crew carefully to avoid such disagreements; it’s not my fault you didn’t take the same care.”
“It’s not about that,” the Professora said with a hint of asperity. “Charles, show her, please.”
I hefted the jawbone and presented it to the captain. She glanced at it. “Hyborean air serpent. I’ve seen a few.”
“Of this size?”
“Not much smaller. You can put that down, man; I’m not in any need of it.” I did so and, perceiving I was so much furniture in this situation, edged closer to the lenses, trying to catch a glimpse of the pass below.
“The serpent appeared to be domesticated,” Lundqvist insisted. “And there were gears among its bones, gears that may have grown there. As if it were some sort of hybrid.”
The captain shrugged. “There’re ‘naut tales of serpents broke to harness and pirates said to use them to attack ships like the Regina. As for the gears.” She turned and favored us both with one of her slow, vicious smiles that the crew so dreaded. “I expect that if we were to crash and the Aariscians to find your body, Professora, they’d be puzzling over whether you were some hybrid of glass and brains and formaldehyde.”
“It’s not formaldehyde,” Lundqvist sniffed.
“And I’m not speaking hypothetically.” The captain pointed to a lens behind the helmsman. A gray cliff face, cut into deep letters of ten different scripts, receded from our view. “We’ve just passed the graven warning.”
I peered at the bow lenses, trying to get a better look at the warning itself. When I was a child, I’d heard stories (all disdained by my teachers) that the warning had been inscribed into the side of the mountains by an automaton the size of a house, etching the words with a gaze of fire. When I was older, my age-m
ates and I played at being the team engineered solely for the job of incising those letters, hanging from convenient walls and making what we thought were appropriate rock-shattering noises to match. After such tales, small wonder that my first view of the warning, some twenty years ago, had been so disappointing. Yet I could still recite by heart its prohibition against entering the valley.
The lenses, however, showed no sign of it. Instead, most displayed the same sight: a confection like matching wedding cakes on the mountainsides flanking the pass, the consequences for those who defied the graven warning. Thousands of snub spouts pointed towards us, ranging from full cannon-bore to rifle-bore, the latter too small to see even with the ship’s lenses. My eyes itched to adjust, and I felt a pang just under the straps of my andropter harness, where most men had hearts.
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