by Dave Butler
Charlie came to a shut door. “Who’s operating the ship?”
The door was a solid metal sheet, with a round glass panel set at eye level. Charlie pressed his face against the glass sheet and had his answer.
Through the glass he saw the craft’s control room. At a central seat, with a viewing scope to one side of him, charts to the other, and a steering wheel in front, sat the kobold Heinrich Zahnkrieger.
Thomas, still frozen, leaned against the corner of the chamber.
Zahnkrieger met Charlie’s gaze.
He chuckled and then picked up a speaking tube from the console in front of him. His voice boomed out of a metal cone set into the wall near Charlie’s head. “Charlie Pondicherry, welcome aboard!”
Charlie grabbed the door and shook it. It wouldn’t open.
“Don’t waste your time,” the kobold said. “You’re a powerful little machine, but not that powerful. And if you are, any force that would rip the door open would likely damage the hull and sink us. You would survive, of course. But your friends might have trouble. Indeed, since we are at this moment traveling through an underground river, your friends would almost certainly die.”
“He doesn’t know about the Drowned Hundred,” Lloyd whispered. “Don’t you worry about us, Charlie. If the ship sinks, we’ll breathe just fine as long as we need to.”
Ollie and the dewin crowded Charlie to peer over his shoulder.
Bob stroked her chin, looking at the locked door. Then she turned to the side, pried open a panel with several gauges mounted on it, and began digging in the pipes and wires behind it with both hands.
“You don’t need my brother!” Charlie shouted.
The kobold cupped a hand to his ear and shook his head. “Sorry, my little automaton, I can’t hear you! But don’t worry, soon we’ll be able to have all the conversations you like.”
Bob crept forward next to Charlie, on her knees. “Keep ’im talking.” She started probing the door’s lock with a pair of stiff wires.
“Put him to sleep!” Ollie hissed to Lloyd Shankin.
“And then who’ll pilot the ship?” The dewin moved his lips and furrowed his brow as if he were making a great effort to think of something. “We’re locked out.”
Charlie cast about and found a speaking tube on his side of the door. He pulled it to his mouth. “You don’t need the other automaton.” The word automaton felt like ashes and salt on his tongue.
“It’s not any affair of yours what I need!” Zahnkrieger snapped.
Charlie remembered then that, although his father had finished the automaton Queen Victoria for the Iron Cog that ersatz queen had been captured by the police—by honest police—in Big Ben. So maybe the Cog did still need whatever technology was built into him and Thomas.
Or maybe they knew Brunel’s plan. Perhaps they knew that Thomas—and Charlie, too?—was designed to put an end to their schemes.
“You could let us go,” Charlie said softly. “You and my father were partners. Do you really hate him so much?”
“I didn’t hate Joban Singh,” Zahnkrieger said. “This isn’t personal at all. And I will let you go.” He chuckled. “In not very many minutes, we’ll surface in the southern Irish Sea. We’ll be met there by friends of mine. They will be very happy to see you.”
Click. “Got it.” Bob dropped the bits of wire. “Give ’er a try.”
Charlie pushed the door—nothing.
“It’s barred!” The kobold laughed. “You know, if you opened the hatch right now, you, at least, could probably escape.”
“What if you took me instead?” Charlie said.
Heinrich Zahnkrieger laughed.
Bob grabbed the speaking tube from Charlie and covered it with her hand. “ ’Ave you lost your mind?” she whispered.
“Thomas knows more than I do,” Charlie said. “About Brunel’s plan, I mean. Maybe I am the redundancy in the plan and maybe I’m not, but either way I don’t know what to do next. We need Thomas to defeat the Iron Cog. That makes him more important than me.”
Ollie spat on the floor. “No offense, mate, but no. You’re my friend. Thomas is…I dunno, he’s something to you, but to me he’s nothing.”
“We’re not going to trade you, Charlie,” Bob agreed.
Lloyd nodded vigorously.
The kobold’s laughter continued to boom over the amplifying cone in the wall. Charlie took up the speaking tube again.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“Don’t you see, Charlie?” The kobold stopped laughing and beamed at Charlie, his pointy little nose and ears looking devilish in the dim light of the control room. “I have you and the other automaton both. I also have your friends. You have nothing in the world to offer me!”
Bonk!
Heinrich Zahnkrieger suddenly slumped forward, unconscious.
Behind him, on top of a control panel, stood Gnat. She was wet and bedraggled, but she was smiling.
She dropped the bottle of water she held in both hands and leaped over to the kobold’s panel to take the speaking tube. It looked gigantic with the pixie’s arms wrapped around it and its open mouth pressed to her face.
“Sorry for the delay,” she said. “It took me a few minutes to find something to hit him with.”
It took Bob an hour to figure out how to operate the submarine vessel, by which time Heinrich Zahnkrieger was awake, as well as tied up and gagged. Charlie would have liked to ask the kobold questions, but Zahnkrieger was a redcap, a wizard whose magic could interfere with machinery. It would be bad enough if he targeted Charlie—if he cast his spells on the boat, he could kill them all.
All the while they were underwater, Lloyd Shankin sat with his ear pressed to the wall of the ship. “There are no windows to see out this vessel,” he explained when asked. “So I’m listening for sounds of the Drowned Hundred.”
“Your englyn worked,” Charlie said, “whether or not there really is a Drowned Hundred.”
Lloyd only nodded.
If he ever heard what he was hoping to, he didn’t tell the others.
Once Bob brought the submarine boat to the surface, Charlie and Ollie were able to row the kobold to shore in an India rubber raft. They left him there, tied to a tree far above the waterline and gnawing fiercely at his gag. He’d escape sooner or later, but not before they were long gone, and he wouldn’t be casting any spells in the meantime.
Charlie would have liked to take the submarine craft, but he was afraid the Cog might have some device aboard that would let them find it, or even destroy it remotely. So Bob gleefully sailed the craft a few miles north along the coast and then, somewhat less gleefully, ran it aground on a stretch of rocky beach.
“A waste of good machinery, that is,” she sniffed, marching up into the trees on the western slopes of Cader Idris toward a sky beginning to brighten in the east.
Lloyd and the chimney sweeps all took knapsacks stuffed full of provisions from the submarine boat. Bob’s knapsack included a belt of tools. Each of the sweeps also had a straight, sharp machete at the belt, but Lloyd declined one when Ollie suggested it. At Charlie’s belt hung the dowsing rod Thassia had prepared, the metal one that would find Thomas…just in case. Gnat walked leaning on a spear she’d fashioned from a long rod yanked from one of the craft’s control assemblies.
Charlie had planned to say good-bye to Lloyd Shankin on the beach. Lloyd had other ideas. “I’m still condemned for trying to help your friends, and probably for escaping from gaol now, too. I’m a criminal, Charlie. I think if I stay in Wales, I’ll end up hanged. And after all, I can as easily find good deeds to do wherever you lot are bound.”
“Maybe we’re more to each other than just the guardian of the fairy gate,” Charlie said.
“I’m glad you’ll be coming along, Mr. Shankin,” Gnat added. “I’ll have need of someone with your storytelling gifts once I’ve done two more deeds.”
Lloyd Shankin patted the knapsack where he’d stowed two new journals,
both taken from the submarine boat, and laughed.
Charlie carried Thomas.
He didn’t want to wake his brother up until they were safe. He knew Thomas was skittish—shy had been Brunel’s word—and he didn’t want Thomas to run away. It was easy enough to stop every twenty minutes and ask Bob to wind his mainspring, and that let him march rapidly with the other boy slung across his shoulder.
The other boy. Charlie needed better words to use when talking and thinking about Thomas, but in their march up to Giantseat he wasn’t able to come up with any. Brother it would have to be.
Gnat found another big-folk gate into the abandoned barony. They lay in the narrow crack leading into the cave until past noon, watching to be certain no one followed them.
They found the nests again, and the steel wall Charlie had ruptured with hand grenades. The waters unleashed in the destruction of Mountain House had mostly dried up, leaving only a few puddles, and the gap in the wall was plugged with debris. Charlie threw Brunel’s Final Device onto the rubble and sat as the sweeps ate.
The fairy barony was entirely new to Lloyd Shankin. He stared at everything and barely managed to get down a couple of bites.
“Charlie,” Gnat said, wiping crumbs of ship’s biscuit from her tiny mouth, “will we be staying here long?”
“We came here for you,” Charlie said. “We’ll stay as long as it takes.”
“I, for one,” Bob added cheerfully, “am quite interested to see the metempsychosis of the thing.” She settled in, leaning against her knapsack like the back of a seat, munching on a strip of dried beef.
“Metamorphosis.” Gnat laughed. “Well, that isn’t quite right, but I’ll do my best to entertain you.”
Charlie never saw where Gnat’s webbing came from. After situating herself into the low center of a convenient nest, the pixie proceeded to weave her arms about her in a complicated pattern that seemed never exactly symmetrical in the execution, even though it looked entirely symmetrical in the result. She might have been pulling silk from the palms of her hands, or her mouth, or from the nest itself, but a ball of silk built up around her and she slowly crouched forward into her sleeping position, until all that remained was a puffy white ball that filled the nest.
Lloyd wrote the entire time, transfixed.
Ollie whistled low when Gnat had finished. Then he yawned, pulled his bowler hat over his face, and began to snore.
Charlie gently eased Thomas over onto his belly. “Can you help me find his mainspring, Bob?”
It turned out to be quite easy to locate, once they’d rucked Thomas’s shirt up under his arms. It looked like twin crescent-shaped depressions, right between Thomas’s shoulder blades. Once they’d gone that far, though, Charlie had to stop and stare.
“Do I look like that?”
“You’re ’andsomer. But yeah.”
Bob had opened Charlie up once, and Charlie had a sudden impulse to open Thomas up, too. If he looked inside his brother, wouldn’t it give him an idea of how he himself was built, inside? And maybe Bob could tell him what differences there might be.
But Charlie resisted.
It felt wrong to think about opening Thomas. Not that Thomas wasn’t a machine—Charlie knew that he was. But Thomas had a right to privacy. Machine and magical creation, yes, but Thomas was a person. It was bad enough that they were pulling his shirt up while he was unconscious; looking inside his chest without his permission would be much worse.
Maybe later he would ask Thomas’s permission.
He turned Thomas’s mainspring, cranking it all the way to fully wound.
“Interesting that old Pondicherry and Brunel didn’t put those things on your bellies,” Bob said. “I reckon you could ’ave ’ad just as much power with the spring tightener on the other side, an’ then you could ’ave done the tightening yourselves.”
Charlie had a dark thought. “Maybe they didn’t want us to run away.”
Lloyd Shankin stopped writing. “Or maybe they didn’t want you to realize you weren’t flesh and blood. Maybe they did it out of love.”
“Maybe,” Charlie said. “Though Thomas knew he was a made boy. I think he always knew.” So had Brunel put the mainspring on Thomas’s back to control Thomas, as Syzigon had once controlled Charlie?
And what did that say about Charlie’s bap?
Charlie found he had many dark questions about his bap. With Bap dead, could he possibly ever get answers?
He probed his side with his fingers and found the hole left there by the mechanical boar. He resisted an impulse to stick his finger inside and feel his own gears.
Thomas rolled over and sat up, then scooted away on his hands. “What happened?” His eyes shot back and forth between Charlie and Bob.
Bob laughed. “An ’eck of a lot, mate. You fell, the mountain exploded, we all ’ad to ’old our breath a couple of times, an’ then there was this submarine ship.” She looked sad. “I kind of liked the ship.”
Charlie patted Bob on the shoulder. “I liked the submarine boat, too. But I like Thomas here quite a bit more.”
“Yeah.” Bob nodded. “I reckon Thomas is all right.”
Thomas didn’t look consoled. “Is my father safe? What happened?”
Charlie didn’t have the heart to tell him. The dwarfs’ weeping had been bad enough. He tried, but found he could only shut his mouth and stare at his own shoes.
“Look,” Bob said, “there ain’t a good way to say this. You was sold out. Betrayed, by those dwarfs in purple. They done for your dad.”
“You should know,” Charlie jumped in, “your father saved your life.”
“Yeah,” Bob agreed. “That’s right. ’E threw you right out of the airship, an’ you lived.”
“But the airship exploded.” Thomas’s eyes looked enormous. “I remember. And then…men with guns, and machines.”
“Yeah.” Bob and Charlie both looked at the ground.
Thomas slowly climbed to his feet. “You saved me?”
Charlie stood, too. “We’re brothers.” He took a step toward Thomas.
Thomas took a step back. “Not really.”
“You’re as much a brother as I’m ever going to have. Also, your father said you knew his plans. You knew what he was going to do to stop the Iron Cog.”
Thomas was quiet for a long time, looking off into the dark corners of the cavern. “Yes,” he said at last. “And more than that. I know his spell.”
“His spell?” Ollie sat up abruptly. “So it’s true, is it? You’re a magician? You and Charlie here?”
“Not so fast asleep after all, eh?” Bob elbowed her friend. He ignored her.
“You know a spell?” Ollie asked again.
Thomas nodded. “Only one. But my father thinks it will defeat the Iron Cog.”
Ollie squirmed, but Bob held him back.
“What does it do?” Charlie asked. Would it destroy him and Thomas? And was Charlie also built to be able to cast the same spell?
And what had his bap intended for Charlie?
And how had his bap felt about Charlie, really?
Thomas shrugged. Did that mean he didn’t know what the spell did, or did it just mean he wouldn’t say? “It’s the reason I was made.”
“That can’t be the only reason your father made you,” Charlie said. “I saw the way he held you. You’re his son.”
Thomas looked down at his feet, and his shoulders slumped.
“But that sounds like a spell worth knowing,” Lloyd Shankin said.
Thomas nodded, and he looked again into the darkness. “If you will excuse me, I’d like to have a little time to myself. To mourn my father.”
Charlie nodded.
“Of course,” Bob said. After gritting his teeth, Ollie managed a nod as well.
Thomas shuffled slowly away. He was a tiny figure, frail and alone. He looked over his shoulder several times, and then the shadows swallowed him.
“ ’Ow long do we let ’im stay out there?”<
br />
Charlie patted the dowsing rod. “As long as he likes.”
Ollie lay back again, but he left the hat off his face this time.
“You’re thinking about Aunt Big Money again, ain’t you?” Bob asked him.
“And Thomas. And Charlie.”
Charlie was thinking about the witch rabbit, too, but he doubted his thoughts were much like Ollie’s. He remembered the vision in three parts the witch had shown him. The grave in the pit. The river on fire. The monster on the peak.
What did it mean? Did it have to do with the spell Thomas thought he was made to cast? And what was Charlie’s role? Was he just Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s backup plan?
And what would happen to him after the spell was cast?
William T. Bowen had described Charlie’s father’s death as a sacrifice. And Isambard Kingdom Brunel had used almost exactly the same language about Thomas.
What, really, was the difference between them? Was there a difference?
“Aunt Big Money showed me a vision,” he said.
“I remember,” Ollie said. “It ended with you falling on the floor and screaming.”
“Part of the vision was a boy standing beside a grave. The boy knew a secret, and I thought it might be me. But Aunt Big Money said no vision was that simple.”
“You reckon it was Thomas?” Bob asked.
“I think it was at least Thomas.” Charlie thought a moment. “Maybe it was more than that, too.”
He slipped a hand into his coat pocket and cupped his father’s broken pipe. He would get it mended as soon as he had a chance.
Thomas didn’t come back.
Ollie, Bob, and Lloyd ate several times and slept twice. When they were awake, they talked, but Charlie wasn’t in the mood to chat, so mostly they waited. Charlie thought about his vision, about Brunel and his bap, and about Thomas. Lloyd wrote many pages. When asked if he was working on a song, all he would say was “Mmm.”
A few hours after Gnat spun herself into her spherical cocoon, her wings began to show. They poked straight up from the silk, and at first they looked like glossy leaves. Charlie stared hard at them and thought he could almost see them getting bigger as he watched.
