Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times (20 page)

Dr. Snailwater’s voice shook. “That, lad, was a message from Sir Lorcan. Delivered her in a sack, like she was rubbish. Didn’t like that we’d taken you in, which beggars the question of why you are here now,” he said, holding the cage up to his eyes to peer at the dragon inside.

“Oh,
Beth
,” Jack whispered. He moved between the tables, inspecting each broken part. He hadn’t realized
until now just how much of a comfort it had been on his walk from the palace, the idea that she would be here. After all, she was the first person he’d met in the Empire and the only one he knew who would understand what had just happened to him. “He killed her.” Fury raged through him, a fire he wished could burn Lorcan whole.

“Nice to see you understand,” said Dr. Snailwater.

“When?” Jack demanded. The doctor pursed his lips in thought.

“Been a few months. Before it got properly cold, as I recall, because I wasn’t worried when she was out a whole night. Daft, seeing as cold makes no difference to her, but . . . She came back the next day, cheerful as anything, and went off again. It was the next day that, that—”

“He’s horrible,” said Jack. So that was why Beth had never come back through the secret passages to visit him. Lorcan had smashed her to bits, just as he’d once said she should be. “And the Lady is . . . I don’t think she’s quite right in the head. I think she’s been alive too long and it’s twisted her somehow.”

“What happened, lad?”

Jack backed away from the table which held a stretch of leg, a long crack running over the knee. Facing the doctor, he pulled back the sleeve of his coat.

Dr. Snailwater’s face lost what slight color it had. “Which of ’em did that?”

“Lorcan.” Jack was sure of it. It was too neat, too ordered, a clockwork plot. Lorcan had wanted to go to war, blamed Jack for the Lady’s refusal. If he hadn’t already despised Jack, that would still have been enough of a reason. What better way to provoke the Lady than to convince her one of the colonies had harmed Jack? And now Lorcan wouldn’t have to teach Jack his magic, if he’d ever intended to at all. Lorcan would have known, of course, that the Lady wouldn’t bear to look at Jack after . . .

The doctor busied himself clearing one of the tables, turning each piece over in his hands and staring at it for a long time before he set it down to move on to the next. When he had space to work, he fetched boxes and jars, his bag of tools.

“Why haven’t you put her back together?” Jack asked.

“I should think,” said the doctor, “that since you arrived on my doorstep—for the second time, I might add—that I should be the one to ask the questions. Shall I be expecting another visit from Sir Lorcan?”

“No.”

“Right, well, ’spose that’s a start. Out with it.”

Jack found the stool so often used by Beth while he and Dr. Snailwater had worked on hands, feet, lungs. Before his
time at the palace. Before the hangings, which was really where the story began. As the doctor worked, Jack told him about everything but for the voices. Dr. Snailwater didn’t seem in a mood to tolerate madness at the moment, particularly from Jack, who thought he couldn’t blame him.

“Xeno said . . . Mr. Fink said there might be a way to get home.”

The doctor picked up a turnscrew and tightened the joint of a finger. “The only marbles Xeno has left are his eyes.”

“But what if there is? I want to go back, Doctor. I didn’t before, and I do now.”

“Aye, it was plain as crackers you didn’t before. As for what that lunatic meant, you’ll be asking him yourself. I don’t know the whole tale; I’ve never cared to. Superstition and nonsense.”

It must be strange, Jack thought, to have been born here, to have grown up around the faeries and airships and mushrooms with tongues. Perhaps he was more willing to believe whatever Xeno’s story was, since
everything
here was so odd to him.

But then, he hadn’t heard it yet.

“Can we visit him? I’ll wear the goggles if I must, but I don’t think it matters overmuch now. They’re not looking for me anymore.”

Clank
,
clank
,
clank
. The doctor hammered out a tiny bit of brass. “No need. Truth be told, I thought it was him knocking on the door when you came. He’s always pestering me now. Seems to think I’m lonely without . . . with no company. That, and he keeps offering to find me a soul.”

“You need one for Beth. That’s why you haven’t put her together.”

A rubber silence stretched loud enough to twang in Jack’s ears. “Yes, and no. A whole soul’s not the easiest item to procure, even by Xeno’s methods, which are best not inspected with more care than necessary. There’s no guarantees she’ll end up anything like she was, and one like Beth’s not so easy to simply replace. Near perfect, she was. My best work. I’ll do no better.”

Jack understood. The doctor loved Beth as a daughter, more than the Lady ever had, he was sure, and to leave her in bits was possibly more tempting than to see her whole, and different.

“Show me,” the doctor barked, pointing to Jack’s wrist. Jack raised it aloft.

“Another day, maybe two. Must let it heal properly. I’ll have the new one ready by then.”

“Thank you,” said Jack, aware that this was a kindness he didn’t necessarily deserve. But he wanted it, not only to have the use of two hands again.

•  •  •

Later, much later, when the sky was dark and the air tasted of starlight, Jack crept downstairs, full from supper, warm from the cozy sitting room. The dragon was asleep, contented by a thimbleful of oil. The doctor’s hands had shaken to put it inside the cage. He touched a sparkmaker to a lamp, watched it flare to life. The pieces of Beth shone dully in the flame. Her head had broken like the shell of a breakfast egg; it took him a long while to find all the parts.

He would wait for Xeno to come and for his new hand to be fixed to him. And then, if the doctor wouldn’t put her back together, Jack would do it himself.

•  •  •

At precisely nine o’clock the following morning, Xeno knocked on the doctor’s door. From his stool, Jack heard them speak in low voices on the step before they came inside. Xeno carried a large brandy bottle, stoppered with cork and wax, filled with sky-blue mist.

“I grew tired of your bellyaching, Mephisto. Finest I could get,” he told the doctor, grinning with his brass jaw.

“The brandy, or the soul?”

“Both, in fact.” Xeno’s cracked eye fixed on Jack. “Hullo, Jack. Seems you have a story to tell, but Mephisto’s given me the, ah, salient details. You all right?”

“Yes,” Jack answered, nodding.

“Shame about the hand, but we can fix that.”

“Already started. Up, upstairs with the pair of you. Jack has a question, and if I’m to sit through this madness, I’d just as soon do so with a cup of tea, if it’s all the same to everyone.”

Dr. Snailwater took longer over the tea than usual, fussing nearly as much as Arabella would with sugar tongs and a plate of biscuits. When he could find no more with which to fidget, he took the last armchair. Jack looked down at the space where his hand should be, used to be, would be again.

“You said there was a legend,” he said. “Something that might help me get back through the doorway. But it’s broken now, so I reckon what we need is a new one and—”

“Aha,” interrupted Xeno, a wide smile spreading across his face as Jack looked up. “You are asking after the story of the Gearwing.”

•  •  •

“Long ago, this land was nothing but gods and magic. Some say one came from the other, but that’s for another time. The gods hammered at their anvils, forged in white-hot fires. Their creations amused them, and gods love amusement.

“The land changed a bit. People came. They saw what was around them, used it for their own inventions of
steam and clockwork, oil and air. The Lady ruled over the Empire, and under her it grew. And, one day, she decided to give the Empire a gift, a kindness for the people she had brought here. A fantastic creature, a symbol of hope and beauty. She used up nearly all her magic building this wonderful thing, but the end result was worth it. Even if it meant that her subjects had to toil twice as hard, construct factories twice as big to do the work she could no longer achieve with magic to keep the Empire safe and prosperous.

“Deep in a cave no sunlight touched, the Gearwing lived in darkness, until the moment came where it made its own light. Aglow with flame and power, it flew out under the sky. Below, anyone fortunate enough to see it caught their breath, said a prayer, and went on with their business—whatever business that might be—happier than before.

“But this,” said Xeno, “was not the power of the Gearwing.”

“What was?” asked Jack, voice no more than a whisper in the hush that had taken over the room. The story seemed familiar, somehow, but new, too. He closed his eyes, remembering pain and Arabella’s voice.

Xeno held a bony finger to his gleaming mouth. “The people loved their faeries, mischievous beasts that they are, the dragons large and small, for they had never known
anything else. Griffins with great brass scales and talons were spotted often in the mountains; mechanical unicorns, ever shy, hid their copper horns in the forests.

“But none, none was more loved than the Gearwing. High in the treetops it sang, music unlike any other. Its voice was sweetest in birch, loudest in applewood, and any lucky enough to hear it had their heads filled by beautiful thoughts, as if spoken in their ears.

“This, however, was not the only power of the Gearwing, nor the most important.

“Time is a different thing to different people—long and insufferable to some, a single blink to others. But if it must be measured by one of our many clocks, the Gearwing flew for fifty years before the time came when it made its own darkness. One by one, the metals of it would rust or weather until they no longer gleamed beneath sun but caught the light and held it in dull, scratched places.

“That was not the worst of it, or best, depending on how you looked.

“Soon after, the Gearwing would take itself to seclusion. Caves were its preference, but as the Empire grew, an unused attic or the loft of an abandoned barn would do. There, it let itself crumble, cogs and plates and gears falling,
plink
,
plink
,
thunk
. And wherever they fell, they stayed, alive but in parts, like a person who has lost a leg
but knows the leg is out there still, and perhaps the leg knows, too.

“And the Gearwing would wait. Beyond its nest, the Empire would seem to grow darker without its light, its song, though how much of that is made up is anyone’s guess.

“It never took long. Someone would always find it, be called to it by a sense that perhaps can’t be named or described. Perhaps they came upon it while looking high and low for a spool of string, or while scrubbing a home top to bottom in spring. And because they knew, because everyone knew, the finder would count each piece, one, two, three, to ensure all were there. And they would know they had all they needed to put the Gearwing back together.

“A tricky process, to be sure, but worth it in the end. The feet are simplest, for the talons look like nothing else. When one builds a house, it’s always best to start from the ground and work up. So, too, with the Gearwing. The legs, the body full of fiddly innards, the tiny, maddening parts that must be assembled into the clockwork heart,
tick
,
tick
. This goes inside the chest before the wings are put on, gear by feather by gear. And the head, the beak, the addition of which was the final thing before it was wound.

“Only then could the Gearwing open its pointed mouth in a musical cry, bittersweet and beautiful, a cry to summon
a flame. No one knew from where the flame appeared, but they’d watch as the Gearwing swallowed it and look closely, for the rust would clear from every surface as the soul healed the Gearwing from within. Tarnish disappeared from brass, and an enormous red-gold bird would spread its wings, but not fly away.”

Jack couldn’t help himself. “Why doesn’t it fly away?”

“Because the Gearwing needs us as we need it,” Xeno said. “It can’t put itself together. And so it grants a miracle to whoever reassembles it.”

“What sort of miracle?”

“Anything you could possibly desire.” Xeno sipped his tea, surely chilled by now. “Riches beyond imagining. The affection of your beloved. A doorway, perhaps, to another world.” This last he said with his glass eyes on Jack, waiting for him to understand. “Only then does it leave in a flight of fire, off to sing in the trees until it is time for it to die again.”

“If I could find it, it could send me home.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Dr. Snailwater, speaking for the first time since Xeno’s tale began. “I will not have you pinning the lad’s hopes on a story best saved for bedtime. There will be another way. We simply have to find it.”

The books of faery tales that weighted Jack’s shelves in the other London were dead things, crumbling paper and bleeding ink and faded leather. But everything in them had
become real here in this one. He thought of the pages of phoenixes, birds of red cunning and golden artifice. They squawked, flew, died, and were reborn from their ashes.

“There’s a whole room at the palace full of statues and paintings of golden birds and fire,” Jack said. “Beth showed it to me.”

“When?” the doctor asked.

Jack was spared having to answer by Xeno, who leaned forward. “How big were these statues, boy?”

“Er.” He thought back. “None much bigger than I am, I’d say.”

Xeno’s shoulders slumped. “Well, it’s not there. The legend has always maintained the creature is very large. Pity. It’d be clever, hiding it among a pile of imitations. Hm.”

“It can’t just’ve disappeared,” said Jack.

“You would think not,” Xeno agreed. “But it has, shall we say, been dark here for a very long time. There’s none that’s alive who remembers it, save perhaps the Lady and Sir Lorcan. Given the state of things, I don’t imagine they’d be much inclined to help.”

No, they would not. But excitement filled Jack regardless. It was out there somewhere, waiting. He knew it now, yet more when he turned his head to see the doctor’s odd crystal ball, glinting in the morning light.