The Kidnap Plot (The Extraordinary Journeys of Clockwork Charlie)

by Dave Butler

  “You’re insane!” Charlie shot back, trying to think of a plan. If he could free the queen and get her into the stairwell, then maybe he could hold off the fake Victoria and the kobold long enough for her to escape.

  “He will be a guilty man behind a failed plot. When the police break through that door, they will find a shattered clock face, the queen unharmed, and a brave little automaton that saved her from her kidnappers.”

  “No one will think I’m a brave little automaton when your fake queen murders all her important guests at the garden party.”

  “You underestimate the patriotic feeling of your countrymen, Charlie. They will believe that their queen was attacked, and that the Emperor Franz-Joseph and King Umberto and the others died because they were the assassins! The Germans and the Austrians and the Italians will feel differently, of course—we’ll see to it that they do—and that’s how one starts a war.”

  Fake Victoria grabbed for Charlie again. She missed, and lost her grip on the axle. She fell to the floor with a thud.

  “Her Majesty will never cooperate with your evil schemes!” If he could distract the kobold, maybe Charlie would have enough time to untie the real queen and open the door. He’d have to be quick.

  Heinrich Zahnkrieger laughed dryly. “Quite.” Fake Victoria glared up at Charlie. Zahnkrieger snapped his fingers to get her attention. “The window!”

  She turned and punched a hole through the clock face behind her, smashing it wide with her elbow to reveal a ledge on the other side. A stiff breeze whipped in and around the belfry.

  Charlie saw his chance. He jumped through the air, landing a little off-balance next to the real queen. He grabbed the rope tied around her wrists and fumbled with the knots.

  “Your Majesty.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  He thought her harsh glare melted a little.

  Zahnkrieger shouted a word Charlie didn’t understand, and Charlie’s hands stopped working.

  Charlie stared down at his frozen fingers. His legs worked…why had his hands seized up?

  He stared in horror as the kobold advanced, raising his pistol. “You’re a redcap!”

  Zahnkrieger chuckled. “Yes,” he admitted. “A brownie. A wizard of chaos and entropy. I make things fall apart and stop working. It’s what we’re good at, you know, we kobolds. We’re good at making machines because we know so well how to break them.”

  Charlie lunged at the kobold.

  Bang!

  He took the bullet in the chest and hit the floor hard.

  “Come with me, my dear,” the kobold said to the fake queen.

  Charlie hurt.

  “Gehorche mir,” Heinrich Zahnkrieger said again. Then Charlie heard whispers.

  The fake queen stomped across the belfry and loomed stonily over Charlie. She lay down beside him, arranging herself with one hand to her side and the other to her forehead, as if she had swooned. The kobold dragged the real Queen Victoria to her feet and pulled her toward the shattered clock face.

  Charlie struggled to move. His arms from the elbows down didn’t work, but he managed to lurch into a sitting position. The fake Victoria slapped him back to the floor with one hand.

  “It is still functional!” she called.

  “Destroy it!” Zahnkrieger called back.

  “You can’t do this,” Charlie muttered, but there was no compassion or regret in the eyes of the simulacrum Victoria. She didn’t care.

  She couldn’t care.

  She really was different from Charlie.

  Zahnkrieger dragged the real Victoria out the shattered window and onto the ledge.

  The ersatz queen reached for Charlie’s throat—

  bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!

  Hammering at the door. “This is the police!”

  The fake queen looked to the door, and away from Charlie.

  Charlie threw himself out of her reach, rolling across the room.

  She grabbed for him and missed.

  Charlie staggered to his feet and moved as fast as he could toward the window.

  What did he think he was going to do? His arms didn’t work, so he couldn’t wrestle Heinrich Zahnkrieger.

  Maybe he could hit the kobold with his head.

  As he tried to cross the belfry, the fake queen grabbed his ankle and tripped him.

  Charlie hit the floor and bounced. His bounce tore him out of the simulacrum’s grip, and he tumbled against the wall. He landed upside down on his shoulders, his own legs flopping over him like an umbrella. Ouch.

  “Stop this!” he shouted.

  The ersatz queen stalked rapidly toward him.

  Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam! “Open up!”

  The kobold was waving at someone outside the tower.

  Fake Victoria kicked at Charlie. Charlie saw the foot coming, but he was slowing down. He threw himself sideways, collapsing in a heap and narrowly avoiding the boot aimed at his chest. Instead, the ersatz Victoria kicked a crater in the wall. White plaster rained around Charlie.

  Charlie was slow and broken. His leg didn’t work very well, and his arms didn’t work at all.

  “No,” he whispered.

  A shadow drifted over the broken window, and then blue and brass. It was the police zeppelin, and its crew threw lines to Heinrich Zahnkrieger.

  Charlie thought about his bap. The Iron Cog and its servants had kidnapped his bap and then killed him. The Sinister Man, the bad policemen with their captain, and the traitor kobold.

  And now they were attacking his queen.

  The fake queen kicked again.

  This time Charlie was faster. He rolled and sprang out of the way. The simulacrum pounded another hole in the wall.

  The kobold was standing on the ledge outside the glass and throwing a loop around the real queen. At the same time, the Sinister Man swung on another line from the zeppelin and landed by Heinrich Zahnkrieger. He pulled a large sack from his belt and jerked it down over Queen Victoria’s head.

  Charlie was outnumbered. He was broken. He couldn’t defeat all of them alone, despite his last burst of energy. He was beaten.

  Unless…

  “Gehorche mir!” he shouted to the fake Victoria. He hoped his father had been right, that the simulacrum had been built simply to obey orders. And he hoped that he was right in guessing the code words she had to hear before she would accept an order. And he hoped she would obey an order from him.

  She stopped, cocked her head, and listened.

  “Save the queen!” Charlie shouted, and pointed with his head at the real Victoria.

  The simulacrum sprinted into action. Charlie rolled to his feet and tottered after her.

  The real queen struggled on the ledge. The Sinister Man waved to his minions in the police zeppelin, and they pulled on the rope, to drag Victoria off the ledge and haul her away.

  The rope pulled taut—

  and the simulacrum grabbed the queen.

  “What?” Zahnkrieger stared.

  “Fix it!” the Sinister Man yelled to the kobold.

  The simulacrum yanked on the rope. The real queen stumbled back through the window and into the belfry. The men holding the other end of the rope screamed and fell forward. One tumbled out of the zeppelin’s gondola and only caught himself by one hand.

  Queen Victoria fell to the floor, and the loose rope fell over her.

  Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!

  “Gehorche mir!” Charlie shouted. “Open the door!” If the kobold wanted to keep the policemen on the stairs out of the belfry, that meant they weren’t the Iron Cog’s men.

  “No!” The Sinister Man tackled the simulacrum. She thrust him off with a single push of her arm and rushed to the door.

  Charlie followed her.

  The Sinister Man lurched to his feet and chased Charlie.

  Heinrich Zahnkrieger the redcap shouted something, and the fake queen fell to the floor. She didn’t stop completely; her legs were stiff, but she dragged herself on her forearms.

  Charl
ie raced just behind her.

  The Sinister Man came third.

  The real queen, with her wiggling, managed to pull her head out of the bag.

  Zahnkrieger shouted again, and the fake queen’s arms stopped moving, too. Her head spun and jerked and pounded against the floor, as if she were trying to drag herself to the door by her teeth, but she didn’t move any farther.

  Charlie vaulted over her.

  “Wait!” the Sinister Man shouted.

  Charlie slammed against the door. He kicked away the stool and the rods under the door and then staggered back.

  Police flooded into the room, a wave of blue and brass and shining cutlasses. The Sinister Man grabbed Charlie and dragged him toward the window.

  “Stay away!” He clapped a pistol to the side of Charlie’s head.

  Charlie’s vision jerked a little.

  Then his legs twitched, together, once.

  How was this possible? Had Bob not wound him up all the way the night before? Or maybe, he realized, running around really fast and jumping far and otherwise exerting himself had made his mainspring wind down sooner. Maybe this was one of the reasons his bap hadn’t ever let him wander far from the shop.

  Oops.

  The policemen advanced cautiously. They pulled Queen Victoria into their midst and took the gag from her mouth. Meanwhile the Sinister Man backed slowly away toward the open clock face, Charlie in his grip.

  “You’re under arrest,” the lead policeman said, pointing his sword at the Sinister Man. He was tall and heavy and had a mustache like a paintbrush. “Give it up now and don’t make trouble.”

  “He’s not one of ours,” Zahnkrieger muttered.

  “I’ll kill the boy, Sergeant!” the Sinister Man shouted.

  “Don’t let him hurt the child!” the queen called as two coppers helped her up. Her voice was clear and calm, and when he heard it, Charlie loved her. “The boy is a hero.”

  Charlie didn’t feel like a hero. He felt slow and broken. His legs jerked. His arms still weren’t working. The gun at his head terrified him, and reminded him of his bap, shot and falling out of the leisure wheel.

  Still, Charlie had saved the queen.

  “Throw the ropes!” the kobold shouted.

  The Sinister Man dragged Charlie back toward the shattered glass.

  “Let him go,” Sergeant Brush Mustache said.

  “Oh, yes?” the Sinister Man asked. He pulled Charlie through the clock face and onto the ledge. “From the window I should let him go?”

  Charlie looked around. The ground was very far below. The police zeppelin blocked out most of the sky, but a shadow flitted across Charlie as something flew overhead.

  He could feel his body slowing to a stop, and he wasn’t frightened. He had saved the queen, so he didn’t care what happened to him now. It wasn’t like he could go home and be with his bap again.

  But then he wondered what the Iron Cog might do with him. Apparently, the same thing that made him function was what his bap had put into the fake queen. Maybe the Iron Cog would take Charlie apart to see what made him work; maybe they did want to reverse-engineer him.

  Then they would build another simulacrum. A better one.

  He had to get away.

  Or at least he had to destroy himself so completely that the Iron Cog couldn’t use whatever was left. “They won’t drop me,” he said.

  “Shut up!” The Sinister Man cuffed Charlie on the top of his head. It hurt.

  “You can’t escape,” Sergeant Brush Mustache predicted.

  The Sinister Man only sniffed in answer.

  Charlie saw the shadow again, and he looked up—at least his head could still move. Above the zeppelin swooped something that looked like a bird, only larger. Something with flapping wings and two people aboard.

  Bob’s flyer!

  “Sergeant, it’s one of ours,” said one of the policemen, pointing to the zeppelin. Bobbies timidly urged Victoria to come away and back down the stairs, but she swatted them into submission.

  “There will be an inquiry,” the sergeant said grimly. “Nothing worse than a bad copper. For now, protect the queen.”

  Heinrich Zahnkrieger and the Sinister Man both put loops around themselves. “I will go first,” the kobold said. He jumped, and the men in the zeppelin quickly hauled him up and into the zeppelin’s gondola.

  One of the men, Charlie saw, was the captain with the pouchy eyes. “Over here!” the captain bellowed. “I’ll take this one personally!”

  Gripping a handle on the gondola wall, the captain leaned toward Charlie. He grinned with his mouth wide open, as if he were going to bite.

  At that moment, an umbrella fell from the sky. It was closed, and it fell straight like a lawn dart, striking the captain in the head.

  Ollie.

  “Ooof!”

  The captain staggered back inside the craft and fell to the floor.

  Bob’s sword hit next, and plunged into the cylinder of the zeppelin itself.

  The zeppelin men cursed and looked up. The zeppelin drifted, and started to sink.

  “There!” The Sinister Man raised his gun to the sky.

  Charlie jumped, straight toward the gondola. He knocked the Sinister Man over the edge with his shoulder as he went.

  Bang!

  The Sinister Man’s shot went wide, shattering more glass in the clock face.

  Charlie’s vision jerked so hard he could barely aim, and his bad leg sprang sideways as he jumped, but the gondola’s door was a big target, and he made it through. He landed hard, on his face, on the unconscious captain.

  The zeppelin’s crew rushed around, trying to drag the Sinister Man up by his rope. The others were too stunned to grab Charlie. Only Heinrich Zahnkrieger reacted to his sudden entrance.

  “You…” The kobold raised his pistol.

  Charlie kicked. He could barely see to aim, but he felt his foot ram into the little man’s belly. The redcap Heinrich Zahnkrieger went silent.

  Charlie stood and staggered for the gondola’s door. The zeppelin was drifting away from the clock tower, and policemen were watching him from the shattered face of Big Ben. Good policemen, it seemed. The queen was safe.

  Charlie stepped out into space.

  Good-bye, Bap, he thought.

  He fell—

  and someone grabbed him.

  Charlie’s whole body was twitching, except for his frozen arms. For a despairing second he thought he had been captured.

  Then he realized that the arms around his shoulders belonged to Ollie.

  “Blimey, you’re heavy.”

  “Get into the straps, Charlie!” Bob yelled. “Ollie’s got to change; we’re too ’eavy!” She made a long sound that was half grunt and half scream.

  The flyer raced down, struggling under the combined weight of the three of them. Charlie knew that Bob must be in pain. He wanted to help. He wanted at least to buckle himself in so Ollie could change into his snake shape and the flyer could bear all their weight, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t do anything but twitch, and he felt himself about to lose consciousness.

  “You’ll have to land, Bob!” Ollie shouted.

  “Immersionary landing it is!” Bob turned the flyer toward a strip of green. It shuddered and jumped in Charlie’s vision.

  “Emergency, Bob!”

  “Yeah, I thought that’s what I said!”

  The green was coming closer, and fast. Charlie passed out.

  Charlie limped through the steam outside Lucky Wu’s Earth Dragon Laundry. He was battered and his leg still jerked, but his arms both functioned again.

  It was late afternoon. He had returned to consciousness in Grim Grumblesson’s office, lying on the floor with all his friends leaning over him. Gnat and Grim had been reinforced by Ingrid at the head of the hue and cry, but the battle against Egil One-Arm and his men had only ended when they had all felt earth tremors caused by the London Eye exploding.

  “The cowards ran away, the lot of them,�
�� Ingrid said. She had a fierce gleam in her eye, and Charlie thought he didn’t want to ever see her at the head of the hue and cry coming after him.

  “Or their job was done, and they didn’t care anymore,” Grim suggested.

  Before Charlie was even awake, Grim had had some kind of hulder witch in to treat Bob and Ollie and Gnat. Whatever she’d done had not only patched up their wounds, but left them refreshed and lively. Grim didn’t need the witch’s help; he was healing nicely on his own.

  And no witch could patch Charlie up.

  Grim had bought new clothes for Charlie to replace everything but his coat, and then paid for a couple of hansom cabs (pulled by yokes of large flightless birds) to take them to Irongrate Lane. The cabbie bubbled with rumors about the destruction of the London Eye. Grim stopped to buy a newspaper. Ingrid never left the lawspeaker’s side, and she never laid down her club.

  Charlie emerged from the steam and saw his father’s shop. Mickey, Skip, and Bruiser were peering into the window of Pondicherry’s Clockwork Invention & Repair. Mickey bent to the ground, picked up a stone in one hand, and saw Charlie.

  “Hey, it’s the fungus!” Spittle flew around his big teeth.

  “And look, he’s limping!” Skip sneered, his lip flapping low. “What happened, Charlie, you get home late and catch a spanking or sumfing?”

  “Ha-ha, a spanking!”

  Charlie sighed.

  “What now, Mickey?” he said. “Breaking windows?”

  “Where you been, fungus?” Mickey shot back. “You and your dad both, you take a holiday or something?”

  “Yeah,” Skip snickered. “Too bad you ain’t got a mum. She could have come along.”

  “Clock off.” Charlie walked straight for the door, fishing the key from its string around his neck. He did have a mum, sort of. He’d saved her that morning from the Iron Cog.

  Not everything good in his life had been taken, after all.