Soon enough, Eleanor learned to observe where everything lay in the workshop. She also learned the fine art of cogs, wheels, pistons, boilers, and the little magics used to bring them to the peak of their abilities. Stella, she soon discovered, was a mistress of weaving not just metals together, but also the magic of blood and flesh. It was this that made her prosthetics possible and would in time bring the automatons to life.
Eleanor would have thought the rough, sometimes verging on cruel treatment she received from Stella would have driven her mad, but the truth of it was she was learning, in addition to the witch’s art, something of the witch herself.
Once, when Stella was fitting a flywheel into the housing of the most complete automaton, she caught a proud smile on her fellow captive’s face. Eleanor, however, knew she was losing herself in the endless progress of days. She had lost count, and been so immersed in the interesting work that she’d not thought to keep a tally.
One morning—though she could not have identified which one—they sat on each side of the door eating their cold breakfast in silence, and the princess realized it was a different silence. Instead of being awkward and painful, the quiet was companionable. Somewhere in the uncounted days, they had reached an accord.
The question remained whether she could spin it out into something more than that.
The next night, cautiously, Eleanor began to speak. She drew her finger through the dust on the floor. “I confess I wonder what is happening in the outside world.” She did not mention her brothers or the City of Swans, but she had to lower her head lest Stella see her thoughts in her expression.
Instead of speaking, the witch climbed to her feet and tugged her chain after her to the window. It was small, shuttered, and usually never opened, but Stella unhooked the latch and pushed the coverings aside. Moonlight flooded in, and Eleanor recognized with a start that it was night beyond the walls of their prison. She didn’t want to see the outside world—especially the stained, bleak world of the rock—but Stella gestured her over.
Together then, they peered out into the night. The sulfurous clouds were still there, but a breeze was wafting them back and forward in front of the full moon. Eleanor felt a knot choke her throat, and would have turned away to the harsh reality of their work when Stella grabbed her arm and pulled her back. “Look!” she rasped.
The princess stepped back and turned her gaze to where the witch was pointing. She saw shadows against the moon. They were more solid than clouds and shaped like great birds. Eleanor shook her head, and with a frown tried harder to discern what they were. They could not be owls, for the City of Owls had been breached and sunk over a hundred years ago—and besides, these shapes were far too big.
They had long slender necks and huge wings. They were swans!
“What swans would fly at night?” she wondered out loud.
“Watch,” Stella whispered, her rancid breath hot against Eleanor’s cheek.
The group of swans turned in the moonlight, and the princess gasped. These were no creatures of feather and flesh. The light caught them and sparkled on brass and iron, etching each metallic feather in a gleam of white. The long articulated necks flexed beautifully with each downward beat. Eleanor was entranced at this display of the maker’s art. The artistry of the work burned into her memory.
“They are amazing,” she stammered, pressing her fingertips against the glass as though she could somehow reach through and touch them.
“Yes, they are,” the witch replied, “but you are only seeing skin-deep. Do you not see how many there are?”
Eleanor didn’t understand, but she did as she was bidden. Her gaze flickered over the slowly moving group. “Ten…eleven….” She stopped immediately that the words were out of her mouth.
“Eleven birds. Eleven brothers,” Stella breathed into the ear of the princess.
“No!” Eleanor flicked her head and stared at the witch. “She can’t have—”
“As clever as we are in this day and age, there are some things that even the greatest tinker cannot do better than a living being.” Stella looked out the window again, following the circling flight of the mechanical birds. “Sometimes a sacrifice is required.”
“My brothers…,” Eleanor whispered, thinking of them all; some more beloved than others but all dear to her. They were her blood.
“Now they are her creatures,” Stella returned. “They will be absorbed into the machine and eventually become part of it.”
Eleanor’s mind was spinning, but she watched her brothers for a moment until it came it to her. “Eventually?” She grabbed hold of Stella. “You mean they are not already?”
The witch shook her head, her brass jaw working, but sagged in the other woman’s grasp. Finally she ground out, “No, not yet. It will take a month for the transformation to be complete, and the machine to take all of their humanity beyond the ability to get them out alive.”
“Then there is a chance?”
Even Stella’s jeweled eye could not meet Eleanor’s, but she finally did manage to grunt out “Yes.”
So there it was. Eleanor sat back and thought for a moment. She thought about how she’d always had to be the sensible one, and how her brothers had always come to her for advice, because princes were supposed to know everything. She thought about how—trapped as they were now in their mechanical swan bodies—they would most definitely want her advice, and yet for once she had to ask someone else for it.
Carefully, she cleared her throat and probed Stella further. “So, how would I go about getting my brothers back?”
The witch stepped away from the window and dragged her chain clanking behind her back to the workbench. She jerked a magnifying glass down on a boom arm, adjusted the gaslight brighter, and began to screw a tiny flywheel into the chest of the automaton—all the time as though nothing had happened.
Eleanor could hardly believe it; after all, it was Stella who had shown her the scene out the window in the first place. She walked over to the witch and stood behind her shoulder, silent and waiting. She was completely at a loss to know what words to use that would get Stella to help her. Perhaps the witch had only wanted to drag her fellow captive down into the mire of despair she had been in for so long.
However, it appeared that silence weighed on Stella, because after a moment, she sighed heavily and put down the screwdriver. “To break the magic and undo the machines, you would need to make skins for them.”
“Skins?”
“Her magic and tinkering are strongest when creating creatures for the air, and you would need to counter that by building metallic vises to interfere with her workings. It is the only way to allow the men to come out of the machines.”
“How do you know about my brothers?”
“I’ve always known who you are.” Stella tilted her head. “She talked about you a great deal. Well, you, your brothers, and your father. I don’t know why….” The witch’s voice trailed off as though she was thinking on something unpalatable.
Eleanor shuddered; however, she was not going to travel old paths with her fellow prisoner. She had to think of the future.
“So I can make the cloaks here, and we can save them?”
Stella flinched, presumably at the liberal use of the word we. “Even if I wanted to help you, I don’t have the necessities here. Spun silver must be used to make the cloaks—it is the only material that can bear the magical component.”
“Silver?” Stella bit her lip. “The City of Eagles is the only place to get quantities of that.”
Stella croaked out a laugh. “Even Madame dares not attack that city—at least not yet. However, there is more and worse to hear.” She rubbed her finger on the rough edge of the nearby hacksaw.
The pregnant pause drove Eleanor crazy, but she managed not to snap.
“It is the silence, you see.” Stella smirked, and for a second the princess worried that she could read her thoughts. “You have to bind a bit of your soul into each cloak, and every ou
nce of your being must be bent to the task. Every sinew and effort must be put into this undertaking. Should you speak you would destroy not only the materials but the magic, too.” The witch shot her a gaze out of the corner of one eye.
“Silent the whole time?” Eleanor couldn’t help an edge of dismay creeping into her voice. She could never remember having been silent for a day, let alone a month!
The other woman snorted. “You shouldn’t have had so many brothers, should you!”
Eleanor frowned. “It wasn’t as though I had a choice!”
Stella wanted to end the conversation there, but the princess would not be turned aside.
Eleanor spent the next few days trying to convince her fellow prisoner that they had to do this. The witch kept to her task of creating the automatons, but the princess could detect a change in her speed—as though other thoughts were tangling her concentration.
So Eleanor kept lightly on, discussing how much of a challenge making the mechanical cloaks would be, and how the person who would do it would have to be a master of the craft. She even sketched out from memory the workings she had observed on the surface of the mechanical swans.
Stella grumbled, “Don’t even try to tempt me, girl!” Yet she could not hide the light of interest in her eyes.
Eventually, on the third day after she had pointed out the swans to the princess, Stella set down the gruel she had been eating and grabbed Eleanor’s hand once more.
“If it is to be done, we must make our escape quickly. We will need every day that remains. If it can be done tonight, then it should be.”
Eleanor blinked. “What about you? This chain is not going to stretch all the way to the City of Eagles!”
Stella stared down blankly at the finely constructed chain. “She imprisoned me here with my own work, but it is held together by her magic. She said I did not know the meaning of loyalty and friendship, but I would know the strength of my failings. It is unbreakable.”
“Unbreakable? There is no such thing,” Eleanor said with the firmness of one who had studied every book on metallurgy she could find from an early age. She dropped to the floor and picked up the chain. It was heavy, and she observed spots on Stella’s good leg where it had rubbed for years. As she studied the chain, she realized that it was in fact made up of several strands of metal bound together tight, and that each was engraved with words. After fetching oculars and pliers from the workbench, she was able to read the words. Proud. Arrogant. Friendless.
The strands labeled Proud and Arrogant were strong and seamless. She pulled and tugged at them fruitlessly with the pair of pliers. Nothing. However, when she applied the pliers to Friendless, she felt it give a little.
With a grunt, she was able to bend one strand. So the weakness was in the strand that was inscribed Friendless. The princess stared through the magnifying glass at the hair’s-width crack and then glanced up at Stella.
“It’s hopeless, isn’t it?” the witch muttered, and since they had spent so much time together, Eleanor was able to discern that the bleak disinterest her fellow captive had been wrapped in when she arrived was nothing more than an act now.
She managed to smother a smile, but dared to pat the witch’s leg. “I am not leaving without you. We need each other.”
Stella swallowed, but when the princess bent once more she saw that the strand now looked corroded. Now when she applied the pliers and tugged, the strand snapped.
“Holy steam!” Stella yelped.
One strand was all it took—even the remaining two could not hold themselves together without the third. While the witch watched, the princess pulled the chain rope apart and gently untwined it from her leg.
Stella stared at it a moment, her breathing unsteady. “I could have cut off my own leg,” she muttered, “but she knew I would never do that.”
“Now you don’t have to,” Eleanor whispered.
The witch’s lips twisted, and her eye glittered dangerously. “She also thought me too far gone. Lost to humanity. She never was very good at judging kindness in people. It is a quality she knows little about.”
The two women clasped hands tight.
“Then I think we should go and teach her how wrong she is,” Eleanor said with a savage grin. “What do we need to proceed?”
“I’ll show you.”
Together, then, they raced around the workshop, taking the specialized tools that Stella pointed out and shoving them into a pair of large canvas bags. They took the sketches that the princess had made, and she saw with some pride that the witch had made some notations on them while she hadn’t been looking. The last item that Stella insisted on was a jar of gleaming gems, tiny pinpricks of light that looked like trapped fireflies. “Starlight opals,” Stella said with a grin. “We will need these for the cloaks.”
Eleanor knew that a combination of tinkering and magic would be required, but starlight opals were the most rare stones to be found in the cloud mountains. That the witch had so many was heart-stopping.
Yet neither of them could afford to stop for anything. Stella picked up a mallet and tossed Eleanor a thick metal spike. It passed briefly through her mind that only a few weeks ago, she would not have had the strength and dexterity to catch it so easily. Yet she did.
Placing the spike on the bottom hinge, she glanced at the witch. She did not flinch when Stella struck it hard. The hinges broke away like children’s candy, and the door fell out with a muffled bang.
The chill night air invaded the princess’s chest and she gasped reflexively. Suddenly the task of freeing her brothers lay before her. Yet she paused for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the weak moonlight. Thankfully, at night the factories ran on a reduced workforce and the clouds of poisonous smoke were lessened. Both woman pulled the front of their shirts up over the mouths.
“The ferry,” Stella hissed. “It is the only airship we can manage with just the two of us.”
Eleanor nodded. It looked quiet out there, and the ferry was not far. If they unhitched it and floated, they could start the engine once they were away from the mountain.
So the two of them scuttled in the shadows of the factories toward the ships. The whole place was so still that Eleanor could hear her heartbeat in her head, but their footfalls were softened by the thick layers of ash and they made it to the pier with no signs of pursuit. Quickly as they dared, they unhitched the ferry.
Eleanor began to breathe again—or at least it felt to her as if she did. She had just slipped onto the deck from the dock when a group of men stepped down from a larger airship on the other side. For an instant, the women and the men stared at one another in the moonlight. Then the men snatched up their rifles. Eleanor standing exposed on the deck made a perfect target, but when the rifles of Madame’s soldiers came about, it was Stella who stepped before them.
Eleanor screamed, but the weapons fired anyway. The witch fell, but the soldiers had one more barrel to unleash, and they turned again on the princess.
That was when her own art—almost forgotten—saved her. A cloud of gleaming green shapes darted down. They were sharp and metallic, and glowed in the dusky confusion of the clouds. Eleanor recognized the shapes—her little mechanical dragonflies that she’d made back in the palace.
Yet these little creations of the tinker’s art did not come to their creator. The dragonflies, with their sharp, long legs, flew at the soldiers—straight for their eyes. It was the last thing they could have expected, and they actually shouted in surprise.
Eleanor saw in a moment that this was her only chance. She spun the wheel wildly, and let the wind grab hold of the airship. She heard gunshots fire after her, but it was dark and they flew wide. The cloud of dragonflies—now only four in number—came back to her, perching on her shoulders. The wind had its way with the airship, dragging it away and smothering it with clouds.
Eleanor slumped down on the deck and let her head fall into her hands. As she wept the eddies and currents of the air played with the shi
p. This tumult would give her some advantage. By the time they had prepared and stoked the engines of the larger airships, she would be on her way.
They would think that she would set course for the City of Swans and the comfort and refuge of her brothers. They would never guess that the princess was in fact aiming the airship for the City of Eagles—the traditional enemy of her home.
Finally, after shedding her tears, she crawled to her feet and made her way to the engine room to stoke the boiler to life. She had never piloted an airship, but her memory of traveling on her father’s ships served her well.
Still, it took two days to find her way to her destination. They were chill, frightening days, in which she sat on deck rummaging through the two bags of tools that Stella had collected, and scanning the diagrams they had drawn. Her head felt stuffed and overfull. The idea that she was going to have to do this thing alone was enough to drive her brain to distraction.
It was almost a relief when the city itself came into view. The City of Eagles Eleanor had read much of, but naturally never seen for herself. Unlike the carnival of colors of the City of Swans, the Eagle airships wore cloth of silver on every single envelope. In the morning’s light the collection that made up the city gleamed like the lights in her father’s ballroom.
“No,” Eleanor whispered to herself, using up her voice while she still could. “I mustn’t think of Father. Only my brothers—they deserve my thoughts.”
It also helped to think of Madame Escrew, and her face if Eleanor could just complete her task. That would be a sweet return.
The ferry was accompanied into the city by a squadron of ornithopters. Eleanor stood at the wheel, her mouth dry, and followed the shouted instructions of one pilot to follow him in. She couldn’t help contemplating that if these were the City of Eagles’ idea of a defensive perimeter, then they would have no chance against the mechanical swans Madame Escrew had constructed. It was not just her brothers she would be saving; the City of Eagles and all the others would be saved, too.
Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables Page 32
