The Mammoth Book Of Steampunk Part 34

A second serpent undulated up to the very decks of the ship, knocking several 'nauts aside in its wake. Those who could handle a weapon ran to the lockers; I lurched out of the way, landed heavily on my wounded side, and cried out.

At the rail, Dieterich turned and the last flick of the serpent's tail lashed out and knocked him over the railing.

There was no outcry; the chaos was too great, and Dieterich not the only one to go over the side. The snap of andropters opening added a new, percussive voice to the tumult.

I will not explain my actions then; certainly I knew that Dieterich's andropter was in good condition, as I had tended to it only that morning. Nor did I have any fear for him in particular. Nor was I so foolish as to forget that my own andropter was back in the lab with Lundqvist, and so any slip on my part inevitably meant a fall that would not just kill me but reduce me to a splash on the rocks below. Still, some remnant of instinct propelled me forward despite better sense and burgeoning pain, and I ran to the railing.

The serpent whose rider Dieterich had pulverized writhed near the bow, devoid of instructions and therefore meaning. I leapt onto the railing, crouched briefly to secure my balance, and flung myself at the beast, trusting in my Merged brain to calculate the proper angle.

I caught the first set of fins and was dragged alongside the ship, long enough for me to force a hand into the soft tissue behind the fin and fumble about, searching for the controls that had to be there. Merged pack animals had always had secondary controls near their braincases; surely this part of the design would not have changed.

It had not. With one hand "plugged" into the serpent's controls and one clinging to its fin, I wrenched the beast away from its attack on the Regina and followed the sound of Dieterich swearing at his andropter. It had opened enough to keep him from plummeting to his death but had the unfortunate side effect of wafting him directly toward the mouth of another serpent.

I wrenched my serpent into a helical dive, wrapped my legs around the closest fin and stretched my arm out as we coasted past. My serpent smashed through the silk and framework of Dieterich's andropter, and I caught Dieterich himself by the harness as the jolt briefly tossed him aside. My arm went numb with the shock, and the staples holding my wound shut tore apart, but it was enough: I used Dieterich's momentum to swing him aboard, onto the serpent's flat head and out of danger.

Dieterich stared blankly at the sky for a moment, apparently having difficulty understanding that he was still alive. "Good show, Charles!" he croaked after a moment. "Very good show. You've got a knack for this."

I kept hold of his harness and didn't answer. One slip, I thought, one simple yank on the harness and I'd have disposed of half the people who knew my Aariscian nature. And the only other led a fragile existence in an easily broken tank ...

It didn't matter. Or it would have mattered, in another world, one where I was actually the spy I'd been built to be. I clung to the serpent's head and whispered to it as I worked the controls, blood seeping through the bandage and slicking my side. "Forward. Take me to Aaris. Please."

Pleading, as the captain had said, had no effect, but direction was easy enough to communicate and the serpent's reflexes simple to control. We veered away from the knot of gunfire and scales and out of the smoke, toward the valley. None of the other serpents followed. Dieterich, still pinned in place by the remnants of his andropter, craned his neck around. "What is it? The battle's over there d.a.m.n it, Charles, I did say I'd keep a secret. You know I'm a man of my word, now take me back!"

I barely heard him. Below me were the green fields of Aaris as I remembered them, the mesh of white roads stretching from the Mittelgeist hills into the fragments of arable land that were so a.s.siduously tended, the clutter of houses, even the sheen of Lake Varno where I was born, where I was decanted, where I swore citizenship ...

The serpent's hide below me rippled, and I followed it with a shiver of my own. No. Not as I remembered. The roads, long irregular from necessity, had been smoothed out into a patterned web, and the hills and rivers that had blocked them smoothed away into similarly perfect shapes. I adjusted my eyes again and again, as if a more magnified landscape would show not just what had happened but why. Nothing but the same iterated regularity; nothing of what I remembered as home.

I shook my head and shifted my eyes back to their normal state, then leaned back, trying to take in the whole valley. My breath caught with a crackle.

It was as if I gazed upon a great green clock, a hybrid land that was not just land nor automata but both. Every part of the landscape bore a design I knew from study of my own inner workings. The slow motion of it even the patterns of glaciers sliding down the mountains communicated a vast unfathomable purpose. A purpose of which I was no longer a part.

And in the fields and villages and kennels and stalls, eyes all like mine, adjusting as they looked up, lenses shifting to see one of their own above them. No full automata. No full humans. Only the same Merged calm on every visage.

I shuddered, viscerally aware of the hole in my side, of the mess of blood and bandages so at odds with the careful, clean lines of this new Aaris. "Home," I whispered. "Home. Please."

The serpent, either wiser than I or interpreting the indecision of my hands, curved into a wide arc. I heard Dieterich gasp as we turned away, but I did not turn to see his reaction. Instead I gazed ahead, to where the Regina, spilling smoke and the telltale glitter of lost thaumic power, was limping away back down the pa.s.s. Its decks were a flutter of rescued andropters and wreckage, but though the ma.s.s of serpents parted to let their brother through, it did not fire upon us as I guided my serpent back to the ship.

For the first time in twenty years, I did not have to make the tea. Dieterich brought a tray down to the remains of the observation deck, where the Professora and I sat in silent contemplation of the receding Sterling Pa.s.s. Below us guns boomed, unaware that they had failed in their work of keeping us out but that their greater mission had succeeded. I got up from my place on the deck (the benches having been used for temporary hull patches), but Dieterich waved me back to my seat.

He poured two cups, then tipped the contents of a third into the Professora's nutrient filter. She murmured thanks, and I took the offered cup gratefully.

"You needn't worry," Dieterich said after a moment, "about the, hm, shrapnel I extracted. I disposed of it among the bits we took from that first dratted serpent's carca.s.s."

One set of gears in among the other. Fitting. "Thank you, sir."

"You're welcome. Don't let that sort of thing happen again, hm?" He gave me a searching look, but whatever doubts he'd harbored had been erased when I brought us both back to the Regina's splintered decks. "Good man," he said, drained his tea, and returned to the depths of the ship.

I took a sip of my tea. He'd made it well. "How much time do you think we have?" Lundqvist asked softly.

I attempted a shrug, winced, and settled for shaking my head. "There's no indication that Aaris intends to undo its isolation. They may be content to stay in the valley."

"You weren't," she pointed out.

"No." I gazed back into the smoky pa.s.s, thinking of the great clockwork of the valley, the machine that it ran, of serpents on the wrong side of the mountains and lensed eyes looking back at me. "Ten years, perhaps. Five if we're unlucky."

The Professora was silent, though the constant hiss from her phonograph resembled a slow exhalation. "Well. We'll just have to hope we're lucky."

Five years. I'd been in service for twenty; perhaps a different service was needed for the coming five. I got to my feet, glanced behind me at the pa.s.s, and began setting the cups back on the tea-tray.

"Yes. We'll hope," I said. "More tea?"

The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois.

Megan Arkenberg.

Dear Madame, My sincerest apologies for my inexcusable delay in responding to your enquiry after the celebrated carousel of the Margravine of Blois. The truth is and I write this with utmost regret that the reports responsible for so much distress in your admirable person are accurate in every respect. I myself bore witness to the destruction of that most miraculous clockwork, and what remains a handful of silver gears, and a pair of bay horses with the most phenomenally lifelike coloring and expression allows only for positive identification.

As for the events that permitted such a wrenching tragedy (your words, madame, but I find them wonderfully apt) to occur, I enclose some pages which I wrote from the seventeenth of September to the fourteenth of October last year, in faith that all will be clarified. In this, madame, as in all things, I hope to show myself to be Your most Humble and Obedient Servant, Antoine Aristide de Saint-Pierre.

17 September.

The lady Porphyrogene's house is called Summerfall, and it stands at the end of a long white drive lined with plane trees and elm. To the east, bare hills roll up to meet the lowering autumn clouds; to the west, the land slopes sharply to the sea, where clear waves fold over reddish weeds and palely colored stones lavender, gla.s.s-green, dogwood-blossom pink. The front lawn is left barren, the better to show Summerfall's magnificent facade. In back are the gardens, and in the center of the gardens, the carousel of the Margravine of Blois.

"Most of them want to see that first," Porphyrogene said the moment I stepped down from my carriage. She took up my bags, two in each hand, and headed for the central stair. "I trust your tastes are not so common, M'sieur Saint-Pierre."

"No," I said, hardly sure what I was agreeing to. I have concluded, over the full three hours of our acquaintance, that this is quite common with Porphyrogene. She is a smaller woman than her letters led me to expect, with whitening hair and skin the color of cream-clotted coffee. I must confess, I antic.i.p.ated a woman of greater beauty, familiar as I am with my hostess's many amorous conquests. Apparently, Porphyrogene's expectations were the reverse.

"You're rather handsome, for a professor," she said. "I suppose some pretty, dithering little fiancee will be sending you love letters to interrupt your work?"

"Have no fear on that account, madame. I was widowed last April."

"Oh." She said it quite flatly, and gave me an odd look over her shoulder. "My condolences, m'sieur."

Presently, we reached my apartment a series of six rooms at the top of the eastern wing, damp-smelling and paneled in sage-colored wood. My bedroom, library and private parlor all overlook the sea. By ingenious design, or my own imagination, the faux balconies covering the windows are like cast-iron bars.

"You will be spending most of your time alone," Porphyrogene said. "Business keeps me outside the house. Perhaps you would prefer to take your dinner here?"

"Yes," I said, "if that can be arranged."

"It can." She paused for a moment, one hand on her hip, the other tucking a white curl behind her ear. "I would prefer it, m'sieur, if you left the north wing to itself. The rest of Summerfall is yours to investigate. If you need anything ..." She pointed to a frayed cord hanging over the bedside table. "Ring for Jean-Baptiste."

Such is the living mistress of Summerfall. Tonight, I expect, I shall be introduced to its ghosts.

18 September I found no ghosts last night, regrettably, and sleep was not much more in evidence. This house must have a thousand clocks in it; I've counted over a dozen in my own apartments, chiming and sending out miniature automata processions on every hour. I know little enough of the Clockmaker's art, but judging from the uniform and uncanny realism in the tiny figures, I believe they were all crafted by the same hand.

And while my pen dwells on uncanny uniformity: it is my conclusion (from an admittedly hasty collection of data) that every room in Summerfall has at least one portrait of the same woman in red. Her features are very distinct: dark skin, pillowy lips painted scarlet, two severely straight eyebrows, of which the left is always raised a fraction of an inch higher than the right. I am sure this woman is no relative of Porphyrogene nor does it seem likely she is a past lover, as my hostess is not the sort to cling sentimentally to old mementos.

At breakfast this morning, I was introduced to the shadowy figure of Porphyrogene's valet, Jean-Baptiste. He is a man as gray as his livery, and he moves with an unpleasantly mouse-like scurry.

"Where is Porphyrogene?" I asked, pushing a reluctant clump of dry eggs around on my plate.

"Madame is occupied in the gardens today."

"Enjoying the last flowers of the season, I expect?"

"Perhaps. I couldn't say."

My eggs, deeply dissatisfied with their treatment at the tines of my fork, promptly made their dissatisfaction known by plopping onto the parlor rug. I dropped my fork in surrender. "Would it be possible for me to join her?" I asked purely for the sake of politeness, as I could not imagine permission being denied.

"Oh, no, monsieur," Jean-Baptiste said. The weather, he intimated and it truly is horrendously gray and chill might affect monsieur's mood in undesirable ways, and wouldn't monsieur rather spend such a dreary day before a roaring fire in monsieur's well-apportioned library?

In truth, he sounded much like Violeta's old maidservant though Jean-Baptiste, at least, does not seem worried that I am going to walk purposefully into the ocean. Whether such a possibility continues, nearly a year and a half after I first voiced the intention, I cannot say. Though I do know this: it is good to be hunting again, good to be seeking a ghost whose tragedy has nothing to do with mine.

18 September, later I think Jean-Baptiste is right, and the miserable weather is exerting an unpleasant influence on my nerves. I woke moments ago from a most disconcerting dream.

I was standing on a beach of gray stones, and as each wave rolled in it stained the rocks a different hue powder-pink and eggsh.e.l.l-blue, cream-yellow and sage-green. The water felt warm against my feet, over my ankles and up to my knees. I bent and spread my fingers in the p.r.i.c.kling foam.

Suddenly, I caught Violeta's scent mingling with the brine the smell of lavender soap, the sickly-sweet tinge of sweat. I looked up from the stones they were dark colors now, crimson and cobalt and golden as egg-yolks and turned to my wife, my heart pounding beneath my tongue.

The woman beside me was not Violeta. Her black skin, her red lips and gown, her left eyebrow lifted in vague amus.e.m.e.nt ... it was the woman from the portraits.

I woke a moment later to the chiming of a hundred clocks.

20 September Porphyrogene took her dinner with me yesterday afternoon. She must have come in from the gardens without stopping to dress, as her hair and gown were positively soaked.

"Have you found anything yet?" she asked. It would be difficult to overemphasize the impatience in her voice; it was as though her sleeve had caught fire, and she was asking after a pitcher of water. "Sounds, apparitions, cold spots in the doorways?"

"Nothing of that variety, no." I felt unaccountably reluctant to mention my dream of Violeta. We sat for a few minutes in silence, before the clock on the table between us began to chime four. "Who is the woman in the portraits?"

Porphyrogene looked faintly startled as she glanced at the nearest specimen, hanging in an oval frame between the parlor windows. "She was the Margravine of Blois," she said, and took a slow sip of champagne.

"Was? The Margravine of Blois is dead?"

She chuckled softly over the rim of her gla.s.s, but her eyes looked pained. "Yes, rather." A pause. "She died six years ago here, actually."

"How?"

"I didn't murder her, m'sieur, if that's what you're implying." Her fingers drummed on the gla.s.s's stem. "That's not to say I didn't want to. Perhaps you are too young to remember, but it was quite a scandal when she left me twelve years ago. A popular rhyme or two was made about it they say I still keep the blankets turned down on her side of the bed, waiting for her to come home."

"But she did come home." I leaned back in my chair, gazing at the portrait. "If she left you twelve years ago, why did she come back six years later to die?"

Porphyrogene sighed deeply, from her chest. "Well, I'm sure it wasn't to see me again. Perhaps she wanted to be near the carousel."

"And what is so special about the carousel?"

Porphyrogene shook her head. "Everything."

23 September Jean-Baptiste brought breakfast to my rooms this morning a small blessing, as what little sleep I can afford is soured with unsettling dreams, and by dawn I am in no shape to navigate Summerfall alone. In addition to its usual burden of cold coffee and overcooked eggs, the tray carried four or five keys on an iron ring. They were old work, plain but st.u.r.dy, with a faint shield-shaped impression on the bows that may have been Porphyrogene's coat-of-arms.

"For the library, monsieur," Jean-Baptiste said, indicating the largest of the keys.

I glanced at the door in the back of my parlor, eyebrows raised enquiringly.

"No, monsieur. The library in the north wing." He held up a delicate hand to forestall my protestations. "Madame told me to offer. She thinks it will allow your investigations to ... progress."

How delightful, I thought sourly as if it were due to some intellectual inept.i.tude on my part that Summerfall's ghost had failed to manifest. I'd have her know, in seven years of investigations I had never once lacked results. Still, curiosity always has gotten the better of me; I took the key with profuse thanks, finished my breakfast, and went down to the north wing just as the clocks in the corridor were chiming nine.

By sheer volume, the north wing must have more clockwork than the rest of Summerfall combined a peculiarity that does not, most fortunately, continue into the library itself. It is a very handsome set of chambers, spreading over three stories and a charming mezzanine. Pale walnut shelves, naturally, take up most of the walls, though the mezzanine has seven long windows of colored gla.s.s, and a few panels near the fireplaces are covered with creamy damask. Desks, armchairs and pink plush couches are scattered throughout.

One room in particular captured my interest. It is, I believe, the farthest north in Summerfall, and one ma.s.sive window would look out over the gardens if I could successfully manhandle its brocade curtain aside. The desks were lost beneath an avalanche of books which bore no conceivable relationship to each other the collected romances of Roland, an anonymous sheath of ballads, Christopher of Cloud's celebrated treatise on clockwork. I paused on finding this last, as it lay open to a page with innumerable notes scrawled in the margins.

Here is what I have managed to copy of the page's text: It is a frequently criticized aspect of the automatic arts that only the smallest clockworks are self-perpetrating, that is, may continue their so-called lives without their Maker's interference. [Here, Monsieur Cloud makes a digression on the religious parallels evident in this circ.u.mstance.] To this, we reply that no other state could be desired. What Clockmaker fails to remember the case of Malory Gerard, whose automata king went mad one day, escaped the music box for which he had been built, and proceeded to do battle with Monsieur Gerard's collection of exotic songbirds? (This breed of insanity, incidentally, seems most common with automata whose tasks are ceaseless and repet.i.tive. The jaquemarts of an actual clock have fifty-nine minutes between each hourly procession in which to stabilize, whereas Madame Gerard's king waltzed constantly to the same facile tune.) While this anecdote is rather amusing, it takes little imagination to provoke a shudder at the thought of what a life-sized rampaging automata might do to his erstwhile masters.

Most of the scribbled notes were illegible, but I could make out two or three: patronizing idiot Malory Gerard's taste in music would drive anyone mad hold the b.l.o.o.d.y thing in place and you wouldn't have this problem! The handwriting was distinctive, not for its illegibility, but for the qualities that made it illegible: a hard leftward slant, trailing loops in its 'y's and 'q's, an overall suggestion of hastiness that came not from negligence, but from an intelligence too avid to work slowly. It should come as no surprise, then, that when on another pile I found an entire folio volume filled with the handwriting of the Margravine of Blois, I took it back to my rooms for further study.

Here is the t.i.tle, embossed on crimson leather binding in a heavy copperplate: A Catalogue of the Works of the Celebrated Margravine of Blois, compiled by Herself in the house called Summerfall.

Two entries in particular caught my attention. I reproduce them here, with their accompanying marginalia: The Clock of the Bride of Death is kept in Summerfall's guest apartments at the top of the eastern wing. [My apartments from the following description, I gather this is the clock by my dressing table whose incessant humming disturbs my sleep.] It is the most populous of the house's clocks, with over fifty individual automata, and the only one set to music the late evariste of Blois's 'Waltz for Dead Lover'. The key figures are as follows: the skeleton dancers, one couple for every hour; Death with his mask and violin; the Bride, who emerges at midnight with a shower of miniature rose petals; and evariste, who leads each reprisal of the waltz from his perch at the stroke of twelve.

[The last segment is crossed out, and this penciled in above it: evariste insisted on revising his waltz with each reprisal. He has been allowed to retire to the Clock of Waters in the music room.]

The other entry covers the last pages of the catalogue.

The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois contains four and twenty automata, none less than twelve hands tall. Beginning with the pair of blood bays and circling left, they are: the bays, Hesperus and Phosphorus; Prometheus the black bear; the c.o.c.katrice, the Phoenix, the Chimera, the Sphinx and the Manticore; Terpsich.o.r.e the zebra, Ambrosias the elephant, Gamaliel the lion, Caesar the panther; the three white horses of the moon, named Artemis and Luna and Selene; the three black horses of the sun, named Apollo and Helios and Sol; the dragons, Boreas and Ariel; Lucien the serpent, Zephyr the eagle, Clytemnestra the ox and Antigone the silver dolphin.

[In fainter ink near the bottom of the page: Clytemnestra does not like the current Duke of Cloud. Gamaliel will only carry virgins if their lovers are riding Caesar, and Caesar will not carry men over forty who wear too much musk. Phosphorus will suffer no mistress but my own the lady Porphyrogene.]

Of the page's final bit of marginalia, I can only read the name Hesperus, and a word that might be killed.

27 September The weather has become unbearable the lightning burns the sky without pause, the thunder's roll is as constant as the sea's and today I have found the first evidence of Summerfall's ghosts.

One manifestation I am quite familiar with, and it points however unsteadily to the ghost's ident.i.ty. No matter how many times I return the Margravine of Blois's catalogue to its place on the shelf, it appears on a desk the next morning, always open to the entry on the carousel. This has happened now four days consecutively, and I can find no natural cause. (Of course, Jean-Baptiste will not hear of me spending the night in the library.) The other circ.u.mstance is subtle, so that I hesitate to mention it at all, yet I have gathered enough incidental evidence to be certain that something is in fact taking place. The clocks of the Margravine of Blois are dying.

Having studied the Margravine's catalogue on the night of the twenty-third, I took an inventory of the thirteen clocks in my apartment. That night, all of them seemed to operate pa.s.sably; but on the twenty-fourth, the Clock of Ravens was missing three of its birds. The next night, the prince from the Clock of the Seventh Slumber would not awaken, no matter how many times his clockwork princess kissed him; and yesterday evening, Death laid down his violin and refused to play. I repeat that I know little of the Clockmaker's art, and moreover, I do not know if such occurrences as these have been frequent in the past, or if this is a new development. I shall have to read more of Monsieur Cloud before I draw any conclusions.

Strangely, while I am glad to have made some progress in my investigations, these discoveries do not relieve the restlessness that has plagued me for days. When I think of a ghost in Summerfall, I feel dare I say it? a sort of vague and simmering envy.

Why should Porphyrogene be haunted by the woman she loved?

Why should I not be?

28 September Dinner with Porphyrogene again. Whatever her business is outside of Summerfall, the rain must keep her from it. She was terribly restless all afternoon, turning every surface beneath her fingertips into an impromptu and poorly tuned pianoforte.