by Dave Butler
The landgrave’s men? Prussians? Someone else? At one point, a fire broke out on the mountain, and they heard the clanging of the fire carriage.
And what was the rabbi supposed to do, with the clouds of war gathering over this small town?
But Charlie had other questions to ask Thomas.
“How did you lose your hand?” was his first.
“I was trying to sneak into the university library, and I caught it in a door.”
“That tore your hand off?”
“I tore my hand off, trying to run away. But Rachel found me in the library and took me to Meneer Doktor Wijmoor. He cried a lot, but he promised to fix me.”
“He seems anxious to help,” Charlie said. “And weepy. What was Rachel doing in the university’s library?”
“She’s a reader, I guess,” Thomas said. In the darkness, Charlie heard crickets chirping.
“You got here several days before us,” Charlie said, trying to stimulate more conversation.
“I knew where I was going,” Thomas explained.
“Thomas,” Charlie said. “I want to help. If we’re going to stop the Iron Cog, we’ll need to work together. You need to explain more to me.”
“I…I have a hard time trusting,” Thomas said.
“I know.” They sat silently for a while. “You’re very clever, Brother,” Charlie finally said. “You figured out something I haven’t yet.”
Thomas flinched. “What’s that?”
“You got yourself all the way here, and your mainspring can’t possibly have stayed wound the entire time. How did you do that?”
Thomas’s faint grin was visible in a splash of light from a window across the boulevard. “It was easier when I had both hands.”
Charlie tried to smile back. “Losing a hand must have hurt.”
Thomas nodded. “I know you…tried to save me. I don’t mean to run. I’m sorry. I’m just made that way.”
Charlie squeezed his brother’s arm. “I can’t reach my mainspring with my hands, and yours is in the same place mine is.” Charlie had seen his brother’s mainspring when he and Bob had wound Thomas in an abandoned fairy barony underneath a Welsh mountain. “Are your arms more flexible than mine?”
Thomas shook his head. “I took two spanners from the wreckage of my father’s home. With a mirror and a little bit of work, I could turn the spring myself.”
That didn’t sound comfortable. “Can I…see?”
Thomas hesitated, then nodded. He shrugged out of his coat, which dropped to the porch with a clank. Stooping, Thomas collected two heavy spanners from one coat pocket. “Lift my shirt.”
Charlie raised his brother’s shirt and saw his mainspring. Even in the darkness, he could see that the skin all around the circular grip was battered and torn.
“Like this, see?” Holding the spanners, Thomas stretched his arms over his head and reached back with the tools. It took him three tries, but he managed to get the heads of the spanners into the mainspring winder. “I can’t do it with one, but with two spanners I can slowly wind the spring.”
“Thanks, Thomas.” Charlie took the spanners and pulled his brother’s shirt back down. He put an arm around Thomas’s shoulders. “You don’t have to do that anymore, okay? We’re here for you.”
Thomas was quiet for a moment. “Okay.”
They waited in silence awhile longer, and then Thomas began talking. “I knew I could come here because the dwarfs who collected objects for my father talked about this place,” he said. “The landgrave has a famous collection. To do…the thing my father built me to do…”
“Cast your spell,” Charlie said, trying to be helpful. “That will bottle up the demon of technology again and stop the Iron Cog.”
“And us,” Thomas whispered.
“Probably,” Charlie agreed. “Yeah. Most likely it will stop us, too.” His heart hurt.
“I have to do it anyway. I was made to do it. I think about it all the time, going to Russia and helping my father cast this one spell I was made to cast. And then I remember that my father’s dead. And that his spell will shut me down forever.”
“Your father loved you.” Charlie said it because he wanted it to be true.
Thomas shrugged.
“What objects?” Charlie asked. “What did the dwarfs say was here?”
“There are three worlds,” Thomas said. “Or, anyway, some old wizard said so. Like a three-layer cake. There’s the intellectual world, the celestial world, and the elemental world.”
“Those are weird names for worlds.”
Thomas shrugged. “I guess we live in the elemental world. And the celestial world, that’s the stars and the sun and the planets and such. And the intellectual world is above that, or inside it, or something.”
“And what’s in the intellectual world?” Charlie asked.
“God, I guess,” Thomas said. “Or the gods. Demons, angels, that kind of thing. Ideas. And to cast the spell, I need to find the three nails, or the nails of the three worlds. There’s a unicorn’s horn here, and that’s the nail of the elemental world. And then I need a piece of meteoric iron in the right shape; that’s called the nail of the celestial world. And then…I’m not sure about the nail of the intellectual world.”
“Your father had all those things.” Thomas’s father was Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Though he had collected the materials he and Thomas would need to cast the spell that would defeat the Iron Cog—sealing back into its Russian pit the demon whose release had loosed a flood of invention on the world—a traitor in the Cog’s service had killed him and destroyed the airship carrying the precious items.
“Yes,” Thomas said. “They’re not unique, only really rare. I can get the horn here. And I think in the library I can figure out where to find the other two nails. I don’t know quite what the Library Machine is, but maybe it can help me. I don’t have all the pieces just yet.”
Only later did the sliver of hallway light behind them disappear. Ollie had finally gone to sleep. Had he listened to Charlie and Thomas talking?
* * *
As the sun cracked over the forested eastern hills, Charlie and Thomas trudged up from Marburg’s Altstadt and across the platform on which the castle stood.
At a stable near the edge of the platform, Charlie grabbed a barrow full of dung by its long handles and pushed. The barrow’s two iron-rimmed wooden wheels ground a constant rattle on the gravel, punctuated by the steady crunching of the boys’ shoes. Thomas picked up two long muck forks.
They’d agreed they’d sneak in, pretending to work at the castle. There must be lots of boys who worked there, too many for anyone to notice.
They’d also agreed they’d leave first thing in the morning and let their friends sleep. Ollie especially looked exhausted, mumbling in his sleep.
The castle proper was a single very large building, connected to a smaller one beside it by an elevated, enclosed walkway. The walkway was a larger version of the one Charlie had used the day before to sneak into the kaffeehaus, large enough to be a long room in its own right, built of the same orange stone as the rest of the castle, and resting on stone columns.
Charlie stopped at a flower bed in the shadow of the smaller part of the castle. “You think the horn is in there?”
Thomas handed one fork to Charlie and with the other started slowly transferring dung to the flower bed and forking it into the earth. “In that walkway”—he pointed—“there’s a guard. So I think the purpose of the annex is to house the landgrave’s collection.”
“Collection of what?”
Thomas shrugged. “Objects. Including one unicorn horn.”
The annex had a door beneath the walkway, which was the only visible entrance other than the walkway itself. Charlie looked around to see whether he was being watched—he saw no one on this s
ide of the castle, and no faces in the windows—and then tried the door. It was locked, and when he pulled hard it didn’t even budge.
Stepping back and looking up at the windows of the walkway, Charlie saw the head and shoulders of a man in a crisp black uniform, marching back and forth. A rifle rested on his collarbone.
“I’d rather not fight the guard,” he said. “It’s dangerous, and it could get noisy. We don’t want to be chased out of Marburg unless we’re sure we can do it with the unicorn horn in our hands.”
“The annex has windows.” Thomas pointed. “But they’re on the second and third floor.”
“And the rainspouts angle directly off the roof, so there are no drainpipes to climb up.” Charlie examined the main building of the castle. “But over there is an open window, surrounded by ivy. How do you feel about sneaking and climbing, Thomas?”
“I’ve lived most of my life hiding on a mountain.” Thomas shoved his fork down into the earth and left it there, quivering. “Sneaking and hiding are the two things I do best.”
They brushed themselves off and straightened each other’s coats. Beneath the walkway, opposite the barred door into the annex, was a wide gate that opened into a rectangular courtyard. From all four walls, tall, thin windows looked down on the courtyard and its cobblestones, and two wooden enclosed walkways clung cantilevered to the stone at the level of the third story. Several doors, all painted red, opened into the castle proper.
The center of the courtyard was a hive of activity. Pyramids of paint pails and soap buckets were assaulted by workers in rough brown smocks, who rushed their supplies into the building and raced out with empty pails afterward.
Charlie grabbed a bucket. He picked the smallest door into the castle and charged ahead.
“The important thing here,” he whispered, “is to give the impression that you belong.”
He found a narrow spiral staircase and climbed it. At the top, a man with short-cropped blond hair and a thick mustache, dressed entirely in plain black, examined a sheaf of papers. He looked up from his reading and stopped Charlie with a hand on his shoulder. “You have an errand?” The words were German.
Charlie showed his bucket and bowed.
The blond man frowned and stepped aside. “Ah, yes.”
Charlie walked on.
They circulated around the third floor of the castle. The building had enormous rooms, swarming now with some teams scrubbing flagstones to a sparkling shine and others whitewashing walls.
Workers were laying a thick blue carpet over the stone floor of a long central hall. The carpet was so thick and heavy that the team managing it had to be comprised entirely of hulders, and their sweat made the hall smell like a cattle barn, even with a breeze blowing through.
Charlie looked for an open window. He found a dining hall first, with a high ceiling, a narrow table down the center of the room, and tapestries on the walls. The dining room’s windows were wired shut, though, so Charlie moved on. Around the corner he found the open window he was looking for. Setting his bucket in the corner of the room, he climbed out onto the vines.
The ivy growing up the wall was as thick as Charlie’s wrist, which was good, since Charlie and Thomas were both heavy. But they clambered up the ivy, the vines held, and in a few seconds both boys stood at the edge of the castle’s rooftop.
The roof was steep and peaked and covered with black shingles. Crouching, Charlie and Thomas crept along the edge, turned the castle’s corner, dropped onto the roof of the walkway, and crossed to the annex. From there it was a simple process to ease out along a narrow ledge of stone to the nearest window.
The window was latched shut. Charlie would have preferred to find it open. “Here goes.” Gripping the lead edge of the frame with one hand and clutching the stone lip beneath with the other, Charlie pulled the window hard.
Sproing!
The window swung open and the latch fell. Charlie grabbed for it—
missed—
dropped—
and Thomas caught him by the back of his coat.
Charlie watched the tiny lead latch bounce on the gravel below. “Pull me up. Let’s take a look at what’s inside.”
Thomas hoisted Charlie over the windowsill with a vigorous yank. Was Charlie that strong? He was heavy, being made of metal, and Thomas seemed completely indifferent to his weight.
Charlie grabbed the window frame as he passed through it, catching himself so he wouldn’t tumble to the floor. After lowering himself quietly, he extended a hand and pulled Thomas in after him.
“We’re quite a team,” he told his brother.
“We’re strong, fast, and clever. And we can wind each other’s mainsprings.”
“You forgot handsome.”
Thomas grinned.
Charlie took a long look around. They were standing in a room filled with weapons. In a rack of blades, he could have pointed out the scimitar and the falchion, but he had no words for distinguishing the eight different lengths and thicknesses of fencing swords. A stand of ten polearms stymied him even more—one of them had to be a halberd and probably one was a pike, but he didn’t know which was which. And what were the rest of the long, pointy weapons in the stand?
Two files of plate armor stood at attention. Rows of matchlock and flintlock guns leaned out from racks on the walls. Knives, long and short, straight and curved, one- and two-bladed, square and wavy, glittered under panes of glass.
Here and there, Charlie noticed empty slots. Were some of the weapons on loan to a museum, or on display elsewhere in the castle?
“Any of this look like a unicorn’s horn?” Charlie asked.
Thomas shook his head, but they paced the entire room to be sure. The armory included axes, shields, mail, hammers, maces, spiked balls on the ends of chains, and stranger things Charlie couldn’t identify. A second large room on the same floor was full of tapestries, hanging both on the walls and on the heavy wooden screens that subdivided the room into four.
A spiral staircase at one end led up and down. Beyond the staircase was a broad wooden door with a viewing hole protected by an iron grille. By gripping the grille, Charlie could pull himself up and look through: he saw the interior of the covered walkway.
The walkway was quiet, so he was about to drop down, when he realized something was missing.
“The guard,” he whispered. “Where’s the guard?”
Thomas took a turn at the window. “Maybe he’s stepped away.”
“Yeah, maybe. But let’s keep our voices down, in case he’s come in here.” Charlie looked at the steps. “If you were the landgrave, where would you keep your unicorn’s horn?”
“Up.” Thomas mounted the steps.
Charlie followed. “Maybe the guard was needed to help paint one of the rooms.”
“Maybe.”
On the next floor, which Charlie guessed to be the fourth, the landgrave kept an impressive collection of musical instruments. Charlie saw curled horns he didn’t recognize, water organs, harpsichords, a glass harp, and a piano whose strings ran up vertically behind a white linen curtain. There were cases of toys, including dolls, puppets, balls, penknives, oddities on string, sculpting wax, and building blocks whose paint had faded almost entirely to gray.
Charlie and Thomas got separated in the room full of clothing. Charlie heard high-pitched humming, a strange melody that must have been coming from Thomas. It was a lovely sound, and a lonely one.
Some of the clothing was pinned flat, either to the walls or to vertical boards, but most of it was worn by headless mannequins. To judge by what Charlie was seeing in this room, for the last two hundred years the landgraves and landgravines of Hesse had always dressed from head to toe in black. The sole exception was the white of their enormous ruff collars and the white lace poking out of the black sleeves of their jackets. Their chil
dren had dressed much the same, little stern copies of their parents who generated little stern headless mannequins.
Thomas emerged from a cluster of mannequins that seemed engaged in an extremely somber dance.
“Are these people as joyless as they seem?” Charlie asked.
Thomas shrugged. He stopped to examine the ruff collar of the nearest mannequin, tugging idly on the collar with one hand while he tugged at the end of his scarf with the other.
Charlie smiled at his brother.
Something was wrong, though. Something bothered Charlie.
Was it the missing guard?
Thomas smiled at Charlie again, a closed-mouth smile. He started walking toward Charlie, hands pulling on both ends of his scarf.
His scarf. Something about the scarf was wrong.
Thomas had left his scarf behind in Wales. The dwarf dowser Thassia had built it into a dowsing rod for Charlie to use to find his brother. And then Charlie had lost the scarf, trying to climb into the kaffeehaus.
“Thomas,” Charlie asked. “Where did you find that?”
Thomas attacked.
Charlie knocked a mannequin into his attacker’s path. Thomas bowled into the black doublet and outrageous white frill of some seventeenth-century landgrave and went down in a ball, rolling and hissing. Charlie stumbled back to gain some room to maneuver, nearly falling over when he knocked down a screen pinned full of little girls’ black dresses.
“Thomas!” Charlie yelled.
Was this his brother, possessed or corrupted by some evil force? Or was it a shape-changer who had already killed his brother and had now come for Charlie?
Thomas came up in a crouch, ready to spring. Charlie immediately bolted sideways. He put mannequins and a screen between himself and his attacker, and it paid off when Thomas jumped at Charlie but fell to the floor, tangled up in black hoop skirts.
Charlie darted back into the previous room, looking for a weapon. He dug among the brass instruments and found a tuba. He heard racing footsteps behind him—
