Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times (21 page)

The crystal ball might only show the past, but it did show the truth. “You believe in that,” Jack said, pointing.

“I can
see
that, plain as the nose on my face. No one has ever come up with more than a tall tale of this bird.”

It was no longer a time for secrets.

“I saw the Gearwing,” Jack said. “In the ball. First there was Lorcan, following me through the train station. But after, it went all misty and then a great bird flew from it, and I thought the ball had smashed, only it hadn’t, not really.”

Carefully, very slowly, Xeno put down his teacup. “When was this?”

“After I met Beth and she brought me here. That first night.”

“Aha, yes, when you were touching things that didn’t belong to you,” said Dr. Snailwater, but there was no meanness in it. “Something gave you a shock that night, to be certain, but to think it was this myth is lunacy. Sheer lunacy! Even if I were to allow for the possibility, as men of my ilk must be open to different theories, it could be anywhere. In a cave that will never be found, or scattered in a thousand bits at the bottom of the Thames!”

“That much is true.” Xeno stood, stretching his legs. “We shall have to think, and however much of a fool you think me, Mephisto, I don’t say we should stop looking
for a different answer. One way or another, Jack must go home.”

They fell to talk of the soul Xeno had brought and of the hand Dr. Snailwater was crafting for Jack, but Jack himself was silent, concentrating. Something nagged at the edges of his mind. A thought, darting away on faery wings each time he got too close. The doctor and Xeno left him, footsteps thumping their way down to the workshop, but as the sky outside grew thick with snow and the room dimmed to night black in the middle of the day, still, it wouldn’t come.

W
HEN LORCAN WAS SUMMONED
to the Lady, he went with a spring in his step. The boy was gone, injured beyond healing. Lorcan was once again the Lady’s only son.

“Lady,” he said, entering her rooms. Everything was broken or torn, but her sadness would pass. It was a good thing for her to be reminded just how breakable people were, that it didn’t do to place all one’s affection in them.

“Lorcan, dearest.” Warmth flushed through him as she rose from her stool. “You have readied the fleets? The Desert Duke will be punished?”

“As you wished, Lady, of course.”

“Curious, that one should scheme to harm Jack after I’d
already decided on peace. That the colonies were welcome to rule themselves with no interference from us. Don’t you find that curious?” She gazed impassively at him, but the scent of danger filled the room. Surely the boy hadn’t . . .

“He said a strange thing before I sent him away. He said it was you.” The Lady stepped closer. “That cannot be true, can it? You wouldn’t wish unhappiness on me, would you, Lorcan?”

No, no. He had only ever acted to bring her joy. Except this time. This last time. “Lady, I can—”

“I should kill you where you stand!” she hissed. “But you have stolen even that satisfaction from me, with your wicked magic. If you hadn’t broken the thing already, I
would break you.
” Her eyes shone. “You will go, Lorcan. Far away. I wish never to set eyes on you again, and you will live forever alone.”

•  •  •

When Lorcan was banished, he retreated to the farthest-flung corner of the island to wait. He’d had no choice but to hurt the boy. The Lady would come to understand soon enough. He would simply not be turned into a useless lump by a mere stripling of a boy.

It was his own failing; he knew that now. The Lady was all that was generous and good, and Lorcan, magic notwithstanding, was simply a man.

She would forgive him for breaking the doorway; she always pardoned him for his crimes in the end. Eternity was a terribly long time for anger to fester. She would grow lonely, and she would love him again. Welcome him home as the good son he’d always been. He had told the truth of what he’d done to the boy, and the doorway, when she asked, as a good son did.

Briefly, he’d wondered whether it might not be the best plan simply to kill the boy for telling the Lady his secret, but Lorcan was far too experienced in war tactics to make such an amateur error.

It was best to leave one’s enemies alive, wounded, in fear. Naturally, the boy had fled to that fool doctor, just as Lorcan had expected, but what could they do? Little Jack would have seen the oddity, smashed to pieces, and surely now was cowering, certain of Lorcan’s power, the lengths to which he would go if he must.

No, Lorcan’s biggest regret was that there had been no time to check his particular hiding places in the city before he left. But they were safe, safer than ever. This, he could feel. He had to thank London for that: their architects and city planners giving him such convenient spots to protect his treasures. Before, he’d moved them from one place to another, never keeping them anywhere too long. Permanence was a relief; he need not worry about them
now. They need not even be guarded. Better that they weren’t, in fact, as someone might ask why.

“Trinket,” he said very quietly. Ridiculous name, truly, but it had not been his choice, and the creature would answer to nothing else.

The imp came running, slipping, tumbling over the deck of the ship. Moored in the lee of a mountain, sheltered from the battering wind and snow. The imp shivered and Lorcan smiled. He was never cold.

“News, Trinket?”

“N-none, sir.” There had been no messengers, no faeries with notes clutched in needle-fingers. London could have burned to the ground and he would not know.

Except that he would.

Oh, she would see that he had done it all for her. She had accused him of being jealous, of all things! Jealous of a silly child. But she was clever, the Lady, and when the boy was forgotten, the hurts healed, he would take the Empire to war, expand it to the very edges of the earth for her to rule.

For that is what a good son did.

J
ACK FLEXED HIS
new hand, awed by its intricacy. A thick, copper sleeve, lined with silk, stretched halfway up to his elbow.

Thanks didn’t seem to be quite enough, but Dr. Snailwater appeared not to want them. He simply grunted and turned away to look, yet again, at the pieces of Beth on his workbenches.

The hand felt slightly stiff, unused, which of course it was, but it did what he asked of it. After a fashion. Experimentally, he pinched a gear between two fingers. It held for an instant, clattered to the floor.

“You’re not thinking, lad. The idea of the hand is still there. Tell it what you want.”

Face scrunched, Jack concentrated. The brass rods began to move, gears at the knuckles to spin. This time, he gripped the gear for several seconds between his fingertips.

He practiced and practiced and practiced some more, staying awake long after the doctor retired for the night. Curled on his pallet of blankets, he practiced. He didn’t much want to thank Lorcan, but it was a great deal more interesting than a normal hand. Soon, the doctor gave him simple puzzles, small gadgets to assemble or fix. All the while, Beth lay scattered on the tables below.

He certainly didn’t want to thank Lorcan for anything.

“You must do it, Mephisto, or decide not to,” said Xeno, come to admire Jack’s hand. “Don’t leave her cluttering up the place.”

The soul in the brandy bottle swirled, its light pulsing stronger as Xeno came near.

“Why does it do that?” Jack asked, pointing with one of his new fingers.

“Well, see, I captured it, so it thinks it belongs to me. But I’ve already got a soul, tarnished though it may be, so they’re having a little argument among themselves over which should boss me about. Best I don’t get involved.”

“But it’ll be Beth’s, when she’s put back together,” said Jack.

“Indeed it will. Mephisto, please. The sensation is really rather unpleasant.”

“We should be looking for a way to get him back home,” said the doctor, gesturing to Jack with his teacup.

“Please,” said Jack. “I want to help.” He’d already been away from London so long, his parents must think him dead by now. Or worse. Another short time made no difference. It felt wrong to leave Beth like this, with no chance to say good-bye, even if they knew of a way to re-create the doorway, which they did not. No way other than the Gearwing, hidden who-knew-where so that it might as well not be real at all.

“All right,” said the doctor, taking a deep breath. “All right.”

They got to work. Xeno, being mostly concerned with souls and faery magic, stood out of the way and watched, cracked eye wobbling to and fro. Dr. Snailwater cleared a place for his tools, lining them neatly up on a strip of cloth.

The first day, they sorted through the pieces, unscrewing and separating one from the next, which made Jack think of Xeno’s story about the Gearwing and how all the parts must be counted. Now and again the doctor realized one was missing, or too damaged from the fall to be used. Metals were heated, shaped on lathes, cooled in buckets of water that hissed angrily.

It was a painstaking task, and Jack fell onto his blankets after supper, relieved to close eyes still stinging from the
steam. Hours passed in a single blink; the parlor was filled with morning. Over a hasty breakfast, Jack wondered how long it had taken Dr. Snailwater to build Beth the first time. The twelve others who had come before her, too, now gone forever.

But he did not ask.

Long copper pipes rolled over the tabletops, and thin ones the width of a pin.

The doctor gave Jack a box. “You should remember the foot.”

Jack did. The challenge was only in getting his hand to cooperate, but after a while he found that his new fingers could be quick and clever if he let them. From the feet, he moved to her hands, surprised by how like his new one they were, leastways beneath the strange skin that would cover her later. Hunched over gears and hinges for days on end, neck aching, the mysterious thought continued to hide from him. It was as if his mind were a palace, with too many rooms behind closed doors, too many wardrobes into which small thoughts could escape.

There was something.
Something
.

“Pass me the measure; there’s a lad,” said the doctor.

Jack gasped.

Beth.

Not whole again, not nearly, but he could see the shape
of what she’d be. Unborn, still growing, a promise of a girl with a ribbon in her hair. Bones and joints, thin tubes to run slick with her cups of oil. Innards of cogs and gears, ready to move when her key was finally turned.

Muttering something about an improved sense of time, the doctor measured the knot of workings that would become her brain, then straightened up. From his pockets came a handful of coins to clatter on the table.

“I’ll be doing the rest,” he said. “I daresay you can go for a walk now to fetch some supper, seeing as no one’s looking for you. Wrap up warm, mind, and don’t get lost.”

Jack scowled. He’d helped, hadn’t he? And now Dr. Snailwater wanted to do all the good bits himself. He left the house bundled and sulky, kicking at the snow with his boots. Too late, it struck him that the doctor wanted to finish Beth alone, in order to have the last hours in which she was the same in his memory as she’d always been.

Jack wandered with no particular place in mind. It was too cold for thinking of particular places, and he didn’t know where he was headed until the familiar-but-not streets of Mayfaer stretched before him. A curious warmth spread inside. He hadn’t meant to look for it and wasn’t even certain he could have found his way if asked to. In the
other London, surely he would’ve been lost before now, but his time here had taught him a great many things.

The factory stretched an entire block, icicles hanging from the eaves but otherwise the same as when he’d first seen it with Beth. He remembered the half terror, half excitement he’d felt then at the sudden, certain proof that he was a long way from home.

With his metal fingertips, chilled to the touch though they didn’t feel it, Jack reached for the filthy bricks. A sheen of grime came away on his hand.