Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times (17 page)

“Look at you, ordering people about already.” But there was no malice in Beth’s words, merely her usual easy good nature. “Come on, then, and bring that lamp.”

It was difficult to keep from laughing as they stepped
into the darkness and ran, Jack keeping a close eye on Beth’s heels, flashing in the lamplight, the flame dancing within the glass. The thick stone made everything cold and musty. Something with a dozen pin-sharp legs landed on Jack’s cheek, and he heard the metal clatter on the ground when he brushed it away. Beth turned abruptly to the left, forcing Jack to throw his free hand out so as not to crash into the wall ahead.

She took him first to the room that had been hers, a froth of roses and frills coated with dust. Blank-eyed dolls stared from atop the chest of drawers, an empty cage, white and lacy and not large enough for a dragon hung from a brass stand. Jack could tell, as soon as they walked in, that Beth didn’t much like the room, but it made him think of a thing that hadn’t occurred to him before.

“Why did Dr. Snailwater make you a girl?”

“What do you mean?”

“All the children fetched from where I come from were boys, sons. But you’re a girl. The doctor said all the others he made were girls.” And there were no portraits of them hanging downstairs on the wall. Perhaps Mother didn’t think there needed to be, seeing as Beth and her sisters weren’t quite the same as people.

“Oh.” Beth came closer. “I’m not s’posed to know, you know, but I heard them talking about it, last time Sir
Lorcan came to Harleye Street. Was, let’s see, a few years ago now, and the Lady’d just sent me away, so I went back to the doctor. Sir Lorcan came in a right foul mood, as if he’s ever in anything else. Said we were no good, should all be smashed to bits.”

Jack swallowed. He remembered that the doctor had never told Beth this was, indeed, how the others had ended up.

“At any rate,” she continued, “the doctor offered to try his hand at making a boy, and Lorcan, if you’ll hark it, got even angrier. Started tossing things around the workshop like a madman. Said
he
was the Lady’s son and wouldn’t have another. Though he was wrong, ’course, seeing as now there’s you.”

Yes, now there was Jack. And Lorcan despised him.

“Want to see my very favorite room in the whole palace?” Beth asked, smiling brightly. Jack nodded.

It was a long trip, what felt like the length of the place and back again. Up staircases like ladders, down until Jack thought he felt the rumble of trains underneath the earth. Beth stopped at a stretch of wall that looked no different from any other in the small pool of flickering light from the lamp he held. She pushed at it, and it opened onto a dark room, its size obvious even then. A ballroom, at least, their every motion echoing. Jack raised the light and gasped.

The room was very cold, and this was strange. It felt as if it should be warm, hot, aglow as it was with gold like fire. Everything in it shone like the sun that was so rare here, as if that was part of the Empire’s magic—the sun itself pulled from the sky and trapped within these walls. Of course that was not the case, but Jack felt he couldn’t be blamed for thinking so.

Drapes of golden silk shot through with crimson blocked the windows. Paintings in gilded frames hung on the walls, the canvases within stained all the colors of flame. A thicket of pedestals filled the room, polished, shining statues of birds perched on each one. Some were in full flight, wings spread, others skeletal and hunched, still more staid and watchful as gargoyles, caught mid-leer by the sculptor.

If
sculptor
was indeed the right word. Jack supposed it must be, but these creatures were built, not molded. Assembled from bits and pieces of other things—a bronze gear here, a flat, hammered feather there. Like his dragon, only these were not alive, and didn’t feel as if they ever had been.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Beth asked, her voice a whisper that bounced off every surface.

“What is it? Why are these hidden away?”

Beth began to move among the statues, touching one
now and then with her bent finger. “’Spect someone thinks they’ll be nicked. Safer in here. They used to be out in the city, just regular old statues, see?” She led him to one of the large paintings, cracked with age, the oils glimmering in the lamplight. It was the birdcage in which he’d first spotted Beth herself; one of the great gold birds was set precisely where Beth had stood that day.

“Why is this bird everywhere?” Jack asked. And it was, not simply in this room, but everywhere. The handle on the walking stick of that old man, weeks ago. Outside public houses and in the crystal ball.

“I’m not the best one to tell the story,” Beth said. “Xeno, he’s your man for that. Knows it better’n anyone.”

“What story?” But Jack thought he knew—it was the story the doctor had insisted was a myth, stopped Xeno from telling Jack. He moved to the next painting. Here the bird was soaring above the clouds, a burning ball shooting through the sky. “What is the
Flight of Fire
?” he asked, reading a small brass plaque affixed to the frame.

“It’s—What was that?”

Footsteps. Not in the passageway, but out in the corridor and coming closer. Almost instantly Beth was at Jack’s side, strong fingers pinching his arm as she pulled him behind the nearest curtain to hide in the folds. The window glass chilled his back, but he didn’t move, used his
last breath to blow out the lamp and then held it as a key turned in the lock.

Jack peered through a crack in the cloth. Lorcan’s neat shoes clicked slowly across the floor, a lamp of his own held aloft. Closer, he came, closer until Jack was sure Lorcan was following the sound of Jack’s own heart, its impossibly loud
thump
a beacon straight to the curtain.

But this was not the case. Lorcan stopped at the very painting that had caught Jack’s attention seconds before, and for what seemed an eternity he simply gazed at it. Finally, he nodded to himself, turning away. Jack took Beth’s strange, hinged hand with his own decidedly clammy one, a sigh of relief escaping his chest.

Lorcan spun around, eyes on the curtains. Blood rushed in Jack’s ears, and he was home again, home kneeling on the floor, peering through the keyhole. Lorcan’s eyes caught the light of the lamp he held, flashing red as they had done all that time ago, when Jack had been so certain Lorcan knew he was there, spying on his mother and her friends.

But the worst that could have happened then was a hiding, perhaps being sent to his room with no supper. Jack did not want to think of what the worst Lorcan might do could be. He held his breath, tried to make himself invisible behind the heavy cloth, wished Beth to be less
solid and real. Dizzied, Jack almost couldn’t believe it when Lorcan retreated, a brief shaft of light falling in from the corridor before the lock clicked shut.

“Wait,” Beth whispered, hardly more than a breath. After several minutes it seemed as if he was truly gone and they edged out from behind the silk and made their way to the secret door. Back along the passageways, twisting left and right, up steep staircases and down others they ran.

Jack’s chamber was terribly dull after the bright, rich gold. They fell through the hearth, the dragon screeching at their sudden arrival. “Shush,” Jack told it, chest aching for air. Beyond the windows, it was nearly morning, the entire night gone in a maze of adventure that felt harmless now that they were safe and warm and away from Lorcan.

“I should be off,” Beth said. “Are you coming?”

Jack started. He could, couldn’t he? Simply flee with Beth and never look back.

But the doorway was gone; he couldn’t return to London, and Mother—his mother
here
—needed him. She would have no more sons. In the calm of this room, Lorcan wasn’t frightening. He could do nothing to Jack, so long as Jack kept his secret.

“I like it here,” he told Beth. The truth, near enough.

Beth nodded. “The doctor will worry if I don’t pop in
for a hello soon. I’ll come back to see you, though, if you like.”

“Yes, please.”

She slipped back behind the hidden door, and Jack climbed into his bed to wait for Arabella to wake him for breakfast.

W
HEN LORCAN DID HIS MAGIC
—
part
of his magic—he did so alone. It was a private matter, after all. Those who wanted to learn would not do so from him. They could find their own faery teachers, teachers who knew magic as old as the hills, and tear their metal bodies apart if they refused, just as he had done.

There were no parlor tricks here. Only a fool wouldn’t wish to know one’s enemy.

The copper bowl was already laid out, ashes dusting the bottom, a square of purple silk, exactly four sprigs of thyme. A small amount of water, not the filthy muck from the Thames but a vial from a hidden spring in the
mountains. A lock of hair. Jack Foster’s hair.

A week, the boy had been unsupervised in the Empire of Clouds for a week, getting up to who knew what kind of mischief, and the oddity had visited him at the palace the previous night. He had seen her leaving, trotting away through the streets in early dawn.

But Lorcan could know, if not what she had told him then, at least what the boy had done in the time before this hair was cut. He could discover whether anyone had told the boy the story.

“Trinket,” he said very quietly. The imp appeared from nowhere. It rattled as it shook.

“M-Master?” it said.

“You know what I require,” said Lorcan. The imp took in the objects on the desk.

“I am near empty, sir.” It trembled harder.

Lorcan raised his eyebrows and passed the faery a pair of shears, strong enough to cut through metal. It climbed on the desk, its foot catching once again a spot on the edge where a groove had been worn by many occasions such as this. It closed its eyes and latched the shears around a finger.

It was not blood, not precisely. Long ago, the creature had learned not to scream, so there was only a tinny squeak to mark the snap, the clunk of metal on wood as the finger
fell, the greasy hiss as the dark liquid poured into the copper bowl. The first gush splattered against the bottom, then faded to a dribble.
Drip. Drip. Drip
.

“Enough,” said Lorcan. It wouldn’t do to drain the thing completely. “Go now, but stay close. I will need you again before long.”

The imp moved, irritatingly slowly, gathering its finger and dropping to the floor. A moment later it was gone the same way it had come, presumably off to the metallurgists now to be patched up, but this was not Lorcan’s concern.

He needed to see.

Onto the oil he dropped the herbs, green against brown. Lamplight shimmered and danced. The water, now, to sit on top, trapping the thyme inside, and then the hair, scattered like dark feathers. He covered the bowl with the silk and waited, ears pricked, a sparkmaker held in his hand. The timing must be exact. A breeze, thick, cloying, oozed in the open window. Lorcan wrinkled his nose, but he had to hear.

He knew an instant before the great clock tower chimed midnight. A breath, and then the first ring of the bell. The silk dropped to the floor. The bowl rippled. His thumb flicked against the sparkmaker’s wheel.

A column of fire, red and gold and scented with thyme,
rose from the bowl, the flames shaping into pictures.

There he was, the boy Jack. Lorcan’s hands curled. How dare he be so like the Lady? How dare she love him so much, when it was Lorcan who had been the ideal son for more than two centuries? The boy was perfect even in his grubby clothes, fascination and confusion on his face as he stepped through the door. Taking in the streets, the strangeness.

Walking into the park.

The flames hissed, hit by the raindrops that sent the people running for cover for fear of rust and soaked the boy’s shirt. He kept on, along the path to the gazebo, which was not empty.

Aha.

Lorcan watched another five minutes, everything he needed to see. It was all there. Satisfied, he stepped away. The boy had not discovered what kept Lorcan strong and whole, and this was Lorcan’s only true fear. Everything else could be dealt with. The fire dropped until only a single flame skated around the bowl, and then it too was gone, leaving nothing save a small pile of ash, which would keep for the next time. Trinket brought him a cloth, with which he carefully wiped the traces of oil and soot from his hands, from the creases of his fingers and lines of his palms.