The Library Machine (The Extraordinary Journeys of Clockwork Charlie)

by Dave Butler

  “Grim!” Charlie whispered. “The Iron Cog have a plan to take over the city!”

  Grim furrowed his brow. “We caught the Frenchman St. Jacques sneaking into England in an unregistered montgolfier. I had him in a cell, but he escaped. Not sure the committee would have let me hold him, anyway.”

  Committee? Egil hadn’t quite yet reached them, so Charlie continued softly. “There’s this powder. And if they can make people breathe it…or maybe drink it, or both, then—”

  Ollie launched abruptly into the air, shrieking.

  Egil arrived. “Is that dragon licensed?” he asked.

  Grim looked at Ollie. “Haven’t had a chance to ask. It has no military insignia. Is it wild?”

  Egil pointed. “Don’t worry, they’ve got it.”

  Two other dragons, each as large as Ollie, but one black and one green, sped from west London. They wore regimental colors, and each had a rider seated on its back like an elephant’s mahout, behind a rotating turret with a gun mounted on it. The green and black dragons chased after Ollie, who flew straight up.

  “Grim,” Charlie said, “that yellow dragon is Ollie.”

  “Ollie?” Grim frowned. “Ollie!”

  “Look, you’re under arrest,” Egil said. “The pixie and the kobold and, for good measure, the metal boy.” He waved at Thomas. “You too, while I’m at it. Conspiracy and abetting to violate licensing provisions, if nothing else. If the committee decides it wants to, it can release you later.”

  “What?” Wijmoor trembled.

  “Yes,” Grim agreed. “I’m sorry, but you’d best come along.” He sighed. “It’s for your safety. We can sort this out away from the public view.”

  Egil grabbed Thomas with his mechanical arm, and Grim put a hand on Wijmoor’s shoulder. The kobold stared at Charlie, eyes big with fear.

  “No, Grim,” Gnat said. “This is wrong.”

  “Shut up, you wingless twit!” Egil One-Arm reached for Gnat—

  and, quick as a wink, she ran.

  Charlie turned and ran with her. “What are you doing?” he called to Grim over his shoulder.

  “Restrain these two,” Grim ordered the swarm of bobbies with him, handing Wijmoor and Thomas into their keeping. Then he lumbered after Egil, who was already chasing Charlie, who followed Gnat—into the cathedral.

  Charlie rushed past pews and large columns, hearing the stomping of the two trolls behind him.

  “Wait!” Grim roared.

  The dawn’s light shone in through tall stained-glass windows. Suddenly Gnat turned right into a side room and began sprinting up spiral stone steps. The trolls were getting closer, so Charlie ran a little faster and scooped Gnat up. “Where are we going?” he whispered to her as she ran.

  She looked over his shoulder. “Up.”

  At the top of the stairs, they were on a sort of balcony that traced all around the inside of the cathedral and, following its rough cross shape, looked down on the inside of the church. Bobbies swarmed in. “Why?” Charlie asked.

  “Because it will even the odds, lad.”

  “Grim’s afraid of heights,” Charlie said.

  “Aye, as you and I have learned.”

  The next set of steps was of iron, and Charlie charged up it. As he raced ahead, he shot a look backward.

  To his credit, Grim ground doggedly up the steps, not looking down. “Charlie!” the troll bawled. “Stop! We need to talk!”

  Behind Grim, Egil hollered too. “You’re all under arrest!”

  The next level was an iron-railed ledge around the base of the cathedral’s dome.

  “Here?”

  “Higher.” Gnat’s voice was determined.

  “I don’t want to hurt him!” Charlie blurted out.

  “Aye, I don’t either,” Gnat said. “I want him to stop in fear.”

  Charlie raced up a further spiraling staircase, the two trolls puffing behind. “I’ll need my mainspring wound,” he said.

  “I can do that,” Gnat agreed.

  Charlie looked back at Grim. The troll gripped the hand railing of the stairs and climbed with his eyes squeezed shut.

  Charlie and Gnat reached the next level. It wasn’t the highest—the stairs climbed a little farther, into a tiny belfry—but at this level Charlie and Gnat passed through a doorless opening onto a circular walkway outside the church, and at the top of the dome.

  Higher than he’d been on the Sky Trestle, almost as high as he’d been in Bob’s flyer or on Ollie’s back, Charlie gazed down on London. From here, and in this neighborhood, it looked like an elegant maze of white stone palaces. Sky Trestle tracks swerved close to the cathedral, never quite reaching it, but adding energy and movement to London’s rooftops.

  “Gnat, look!”

  Gnat spun on Charlie’s shoulder just in time to see what appeared to be the final strokes in a duel between the green and black dragons on the one hand and Ollie the yellow dragon on the other. They rolled over the Thames, and Ollie and the black dragon clutched each other with their claws as if wrestling, and spun around and around in midair.

  The green dragon’s gunner-mahout took careful aim. Bang! and bang! and bang! again he fired his big gun.

  Ollie ROARED!—

  threw himself away from the black dragon—

  and disappeared.

  “Ollie!” Charlie screamed.

  “You’re under arrest!” Egil One-Arm bellowed again.

  “Charlie,” Gnat whispered into his ear. “Throw me up there!”

  Charlie did as he was told, tossing Gnat to the belfry. She alighted easily and perched, looking down.

  Egil charged, panting, through the door and stooped to grab for Charlie.

  Charlie shrank—

  Gnat jumped—

  grabbed Egil by one big cowlike ear—

  and dragged his face into the iron railing.

  Bong!

  Egil sank to the stone walkway, dazed. His mechanical arm swung in a slow circle, like a boat that had lost its pilot.

  “That leaves one, Charlie!” Gnat cried. “Follow me!”

  They left Egil muttering to himself in a choked voice and raced back down the stairs. Grim, dragging himself upward one step at a time, heard them coming and cocked a single eye.

  “Egil? Eh, Gnat, Charlie! Stop!”

  “Arrest me, will you?” Gnat cried. She leaped from the steps to the handrail, protected from falling to her death by nothing but her own agility, and then she leaped toward Grim’s face.

  Grim tried to grab her but missed, which was no surprise, given that his eyes were closed. Gnat landed with her feet on Grim’s forehead and gripped his two long horns, vaulting herself over his top hat.

  Grim leaned back, swatting at the pixie who had once been his clerk.

  Charlie slid, feetfirst, beneath Grim, and grabbed Grim’s ankle as he passed.

  Grim was off-balance already, and Charlie was heavy and moving fast. With a roar that passed through a choking sound and became a high-pitched yelp, Grim fell forward onto his face on the steps.

  Crunch.

  The steps bowed beneath the weight.

  Charlie hesitated and looked back.

  “We’ve got to run!” Gnat called.

  Grim lay facedown on the iron steps, groaning. The iron groaned now too, and Charlie saw several of the bars in the framework beneath Grim begin to bend.

  Charlie leaped forward, grabbing Grim’s belt with one hand and the undamaged portion of the staircase with the other.

  Crack!

  The stairs gave way beneath Grim, and he and Charlie fell. Charlie’s grip on both the troll and the stairs held, though it felt as if his arms might come out of their sockets.

  Grim yelped and squirmed, hands over his eyes.

  “I’ve
got you, Grim!” Charlie grunted.

  Another length of the staircase bent, and they fell twelve feet. In descending, though, they came closer to the walkway at the base of the great dome. Bobbies in blue uniforms waited there, shouting directions to Charlie.

  Other bobbies, he saw, were shoving Gnat into a device that looked like a birdcage.

  “Can you catch him?” Charlie called to the bobbies.

  They looked at him as if he were mad, but he felt the next level of the stairs straining and about to go. His arms, too, felt overextended. Grunting with the strain, Charlie rocked his friend Grim out away from the policemen and then began swinging him back in the other direction—

  the stairs gave out again, and they dropped—

  and Charlie released Grim, hurling him into the crowd of bobbies.

  At that moment, Charlie’s own arms and legs jerked violently, and he lost his grip. He fell, policemen and others scattering out of his way, and bounced on the stone floor. Standing, he managed to totter, limping and shaking, halfway to the front doors of St. Paul’s before he pitched over, unconscious.

  Charlie sat on a stool, facing his bap.

  Bap sat on another stool, facing Charlie. They were in the reception room of Pondicherry’s Clockwork Invention & Repair, and Charlie dimly thought there was something wrong with that.

  He couldn’t quite put his finger on the problem.

  Between them, hanging on the wall, was Bap’s portrait of Queen Victoria. The queen looked back and forth at Charlie and his father and frowned. It wasn’t a frown of disapproval, but more of fear.

  Charlie went to stand up, but stopped. There was no floor between him and Bap, but only a yawning chasm, dark and spitting out a boiling mist. Down deep in the abyss, Charlie heard a wailing sound that reminded him of the sounds made by the nāgas, but somehow he knew that this call was made by an older beast, and one that was more terrifying.

  “Charlie,” his bap said, reaching across the chasm to pinch Charlie’s thigh. “Your work is not done.”

  * * *

  Charlie opened his eyes to dim light.

  Not the organic glow of gloom-moss, with its tiny humanoid figures wiggling inside, but a pale white illumination cast by a bulb.

  “Hello, Charlie,” Thomas said.

  Charlie sat up and found he was on moldy straw, in a niche set into a stone wall. Thomas had just finished winding Charlie’s mainspring and stepped back, smiling ruefully. Overhead, a single long tube emitted a weak gray light and a faint audible buzz.

  Jan Wijmoor sat on another bed niche. Like Charlie, he leaned forward to avoid banging his head on the wall. In a third niche, Charlie saw Natalie de Minimis. She was small enough to fit inside entirely, with her knees up and her arms crossed over the top of them.

  “Hello, Charlie,” Wijmoor and Gnat said together.

  The room with the sleeping niches held the four of them prisoner. Beside an iron door, a rusty pail and a wooden pitcher rested on the floor.

  “We’re in gaol,” Charlie said. “Did Grim…?”

  “Aye,” Gnat said. “Grim is with the police now, Charlie. He had us arrested, and here we are. We’re to be tried for something called Violation of Committee Order Number One, if you can believe it. Subsection two.”

  “I never heard of that,” Charlie said.

  “Nay, nor have I. It sounds like nonsense.” Gnat sighed. “And yet here we are.”

  “I wish we had the sweeps,” Charlie said. “Bob could pick that lock.”

  “And Ollie could turn into a dragon and knock down the entire prison,” Thomas added.

  “He’s not the same Ollie I first met,” Charlie said thoughtfully.

  “No?” Gnat asked.

  “In good ways, I mean,” Charlie said. “He’s learned things. Although it turns out that, in a sense, he was never the Ollie I thought he was. He knew Bob’s secret for…I’m not sure, donkey’s years, I think, as he would say…and kept it. He even kept Bob’s secret from her. What kind of person would do that?”

  “A devoted person.” Gnat looked at the ceiling of her sleeping niche and sighed again. “A person who would risk himself for the one he loves.”

  “But just because Ollie and Bob aren’t here doesn’t make us helpless.” Charlie stood and walked to the door. It was a steel rectangle, with rivets around its outside edge every three inches, and a barred viewing window just barely low enough for Charlie to look through. “Come on, Thomas, let’s give this a try.”

  Thomas looked down at his feet.

  “What is it?” Charlie asked.

  “I didn’t do what my father wanted,” Thomas said. “We collected the three nails, but then we didn’t seal up the demon.”

  “Because we had a better idea,” Charlie said.

  Thomas shook his head. “You had a better idea. I was afraid.”

  Charlie nudged his brother. “It’s not over yet, Thomas.”

  Charlie and Thomas both wrapped their fingers around the little window in the door, and each braced himself with a foot against the wall.

  “On three,” Charlie said. “One, two, three.”

  They pulled.

  Nothing happened.

  “Harder,” Thomas grunted.

  They strained, and Charlie felt his mechanisms spinning within him, and the door didn’t budge.

  “Nay, ’tis too strong a door.”

  Charlie sighed. “You’re right.”

  The boys rewound each other’s springs.

  Charlie was just finishing winding Thomas when he heard voices in the corridor.

  “Will you all be at the grand opening of the pumping station, then?” This voice was a troll’s, but Charlie didn’t recognize it. “Hampstead Heath is a bit posh for a water tower. Not quite sure what they’ll do there—might break a bottle on the side of it, like they do with a ship. Cut a ribbon, maybe. Mmm, taken a wrong turn. Not sure, but I think it must be one of these doors. Ah yes, here it is.”

  “Well, if you’ve an innocent pixie in your gaols, she needs to be freed immediately.” This sounded like Heinrich Zahnkrieger. Charlie wanted to say something about finding the kobold here, but all he could do was stare at Thomas, openmouthed.

  Thomas stared back with the same stunned expression.

  “Immediately!” This was a fairy, and Charlie recognized the voice but couldn’t quite place it.

  “Couldn’t agree more,” the hulder rumbled. “We’re supposed to be arresting people who commit anti-human crimes, and not elder folk in general. Obviously, I mean—look at me. A mistake, I’m sure.”

  When the door opened, a troll stepped theatrically aside and waved at the cell. The troll wore a long brown coat and held a club in his hand. He was one of the trolls who had been holding the crowd back from the burning building at St. Paul’s, or he looked like one of them.

  “Here’s the pixie,” he said. “One of yours, no?”

  Three small people entered the cell, two of them flying. Gnat turned to face them.

  Heinrich Zahnkrieger, now dressed in a navy suit with pinstripes and a red cravat, wheeled and looked at the troll with suspicion on his face.

  Juliet Edelstein, the Undergravine of Hesse, flitted back in surprise.

  Elisabel de Minimis, Gnat’s cousin, hovered beside her. The Baroness of Underthames wore a tricorn hat and breeches, and her face was twisted into a mask of anger.

  “What is this, you idiot?” Zahnkrieger snapped at the troll.

  “Said he was from Underthames, that’s what I was told.” The troll cleared his throat. “This fairy is a troublemaker and it was quite hard to arrest him. Her, rather. Isn’t she one of yours, Baroness? Underthames, no?”

  “I should have known better than to trust a jotun,” Elisabel de Minimis growled.

  “This fairy must st
ay locked up.” Heinrich sniffed, tugged at his jacket sleeves, and turned.

  “Herr Doktor,” Jan Wijmoor said.

  Heinrich stopped and fussed with his high starched collar, but he didn’t leave.

  “I did you wrong,” Wijmoor said. “I should have guided you, and I should have taken more involvement in your work. I should have spoken up more vocally on your behalf, Herr Doktor Ingenieur Zahnkrieger, and if you had to fall by the Internal Auditor’s memorandum, then I should have fallen with you.”

  “Yes,” Zahnkrieger said slowly, and he pivoted on one heel. “You should have. But you didn’t. Did you?”

  Wijmoor looked down. “I am sorry.”

  “Your regret is not enough.” Zahnkrieger’s eyes smoldered.

  “We chose not to take away your gift,” Charlie said. “Remember that. We could have summoned that demon and bottled it up, and you would have lost your magic. But we didn’t.”

  “Was that your consideration?” Zahnkrieger wheeled on Charlie. “Generosity toward me? Or was it rather pity for yourselves?”

  “We chose compassion toward everyone.” Charlie tried to stay calm, and was becoming aware that Elisabel and Natalie de Minimis were engaged in a staring match, eyes locked and jaws furiously clenched. “For you and for ourselves and also for all the people in the world who today benefit from hospitals, and airships, and factories, and water pumps, and tractors.”

  Zahnkrieger played with the knot of his cravat. “Good. So you’re coming around.”

  “I challenge you!” Gnat howled. She stood on the edge of her sleeping niche, head and shoulders rising out of the alcove, making her about the height of her cousin, though Elisabel flew and Gnat was still wingless. “I call all here to witness, Elisabel, that I challenge you!”

  The ferocity of Gnat’s demand sent both kobolds and Charlie stumbling back. Charlie thought he even saw the troll’s hair blown sideways by the force of the pixie’s anger. Gnat herself trembled; how did she not fall?

  “By what right?” Elisabel’s voice was an equally ringing shriek, and her wings hummed a low bass note below her response.

  “By the right of my mother’s rule!” Gnat cried. “And by my own three mighty deeds!”