Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times (16 page)

No luck. His heart sank, just a bit. Possibly they were angry with him for leaving, though he had explained everything he could in the note. Everything but Lorcan’s voice, which only made him sound mad.

From the corner of his eye, Jack saw Lorcan watching him and smiling for once.

Enjoy it while you can, your lordship.
Jack shook his head to clear the voice, which was dripping with nastiness.

The crowd swelled and was now a seething of flags on little sticks. Beside him, the Lady’s thrill was warm and
thick as wool. She waved now and then before sitting back and commanding Arabella to fetch some tea.

Jack grinned. Parades and flags and cheers and this magnificent place where everything ran on clockwork and steam under the rule of his new mother.

It was all for him.

•  •  •

Slowly, the crowd thinned as the ship sailed through the city’s widest streets. Far behind them, people were likely going back to their measured, clicking lives, small gears turning big ones, the cogs of the Empire continuing to run.

“Back to the palace,” Lorcan ordered a guard at the helm, but the Lady held up her hand.

“It’s so lovely to be out,” she said. “A tour, I think! Yes, Jack should see the country.”

“Lady—”

Her eyes turned to flint. “It was not a request.”

She will spoil you now, little Jack, but you won’t be young forever.

Jack ignored Lorcan. Inside, his heart lifted with the ship rising into the air. Lorcan’s boots rang on the deck, storming away until Jack couldn’t hear them over the engine. The tea Arabella brought grew cold; the rooftops shrank.

At speed, it took only moments to reach the outskirts of the city. Towering smokestacks sat in fields and hurled
blackness to the skies. The ship wove around them, turning deftly this way and that with the help of flapping sails and lucky winds.

In the distance, if he squinted, Jack saw what he was certain was sunlight striping a patchwork of green. He took a deep breath and coughed; the air was no cleaner, not yet. When he rubbed his eyes, his hand came away smudged with soot.

“Come sit with me, darling,” said the Lady. “I wish to tell you a story. Arabella, go amuse yourself elsewhere.”

Jack wanted to look, not listen, but he thought of her tone when she’d spoken to Lorcan, and so he turned away from the railing and took his seat. She was turning her china teacup in her delicate hands. The wind had tossed the feathers on her little topper, and her skin was perhaps a bit gray with ash, but she was still beautiful. She smiled at him.

“They all know you now,” she said. Then, to herself, “It never lasts long.”

“What do you mean, Mother?”

The teacup turned a half circle. “You will grow old. It happens so quickly.”

Something fluttered in Jack’s belly. “You don’t get older.”

The Lady shook her head. “Occasionally I think that would be grand, but no, I will never be anything except what I am now.”

“How?” Jack swallowed. “How is that possible . . . Mother?” He was aware that the voices around them had ceased, or perhaps it was only that they faded away so that he could properly listen.

“I am rather special, my darling. I mean, clearly.” Her laugh tinkled, drifted away on the wind like chimes, and she began to speak in earnest. “The place you come from, London, is a bit different, isn’t it? Lorcan tells me stories after those times when he must visit. I haven’t seen it in a very long time, and so he has created this one for me to look just like it is now—bridges and buildings and that magnificent clock!—so that I can know, but it is still different.

“This land”—she took a hand from her cup and waved it in the direction of the mountains in the distance, snow-capped, edges crisp as silence—“has ever been an island particularly receptive to faery magic. To gods and monsters.”

Jack couldn’t breathe, but it wasn’t because of filthy air. The clouds had thinned, cleared as they left the city behind. Frosty blue, lit by the sun, stretched out as far as Jack could see.

The Lady gaily threw her hands upward. “Oh, I do not know exactly how it all works. Only that there is this, and your land, and perhaps a hundred others. We can never
be certain of the number. All a bit the same and a bit not.”

That was what Xeno had said, too. That there might be worlds that ran on water or sunlight or other things, unknown things.

“There are doorways between these worlds; you must simply know where to look. Oh, yes, the signs are always clear. I went through only once, long ago, in the hopes of taking your land for myself. The errors of others cursed me.” She scowled, her face ugly for an instant. “Tell me, little Jack, is perfection too much to ask for?”

He did not know what to say. The mountains were nearly upon them.

“I tell you, it is not. I brought back as many of your people as I could, but their children were not perfect, their grandchildren less so. They are weak and stupid; the clouds sicken them. And so Lorcan went through the doorway to fetch you for me, as the one before fetched him, and now we can have an excellent good time while you are still young. Someday, after you are old, it will be your turn to fetch me another son, but let’s not think of that just now.”

Slowly, Jack turned to peer around the back of the throne. Lorcan was ten yards away. Watching.

She didn’t know.

Tell her I have destroyed the doorway,
said Lorcan inside Jack’s head,
and you will not make it off this ship alive.

“What would you like to do while you are young, dearest?”

Jack stood, feeling taller than Lorcan. Now he had a secret of his own. “May I steer the ship?”

The captain was called, Jack’s hands placed on the great wheel. Lorcan’s eyes burned on Jack as if someone had dropped two hot coals down his coat. The Lady clapped, all gleaming joy.

Jack laughed into the wind that rushed his face, filled his ears with a howl. The mountains swallowed them, a forest of stone. He turned the ship so sharply a tray of cakes clattered to the rug, a grotesque smash of raspberries and cream. A bird swooped ahead, wings bent at the hinges to catch the air. A stream tumbled below, white and frothed. The wheel fit perfectly to his fingers; the ship seemed to answer his thoughts. This way, then that.

It came from nowhere. At first, Jack thought the roar was only the wind and the engine. Behind him, men screamed to be heard.

“Ready the cannons!”

Jack spun. Nearly fell in surprise. A jet of steam, boiling, scalding, blew from the dragon’s mouth. Warmth brushed Jack’s arms. Wings half as long as the ship itself screeched, in desperate need of oiling. Great bronze scales covered it all over. Glass eyes large as boulders swept back and forth
over the running men. It was just like his small one at the palace, but exponentially, terrifyingly larger.

“Give me the wheel,” ordered the captain.

But Jack held fast.

“Don’t kill it!” he said. “Please.”

The Lady’s hand was over her mouth, and Jack thought, fleetingly, that she was hiding a smile.

More steam, a blade of it keen enough to slice a sail in two. The cloth whipped away to the mountains and beyond into nothing. “The cannons!” Lorcan shouted. Jack turned the wheel, sending a chase of teapots and sugar tongs across the deck. A cannonball shot from below, missing the dragon’s belly by a foot. A sheet of rock fell to earth; a plume of fire rose from the mountainside. “Stupid child!”

The slap echoed around the ship, above the cacophony. Lorcan staggered into Jack’s sight and out of it again, reeling from the Lady’s blow as Jack urged the ship around the jagged mountain peaks.

“It’s thirsty!” Jack shouted to the captain. “It only needs oil!” He was certain, certain that the dragon didn’t want to harm them. It was frightened, caged by the entire sky.

The ship canted and spun in the wake of the dragon’s wings. Jack’s knuckles were white against the brass wheel, holding tight as he could as he tried to dodge the angry gusts of steam and the frantic, flapping creature. Men skittered over the deck, running to and fro. Arabella cowered against a mast. The Lady, fearless, sat on her throne. Lorcan was nowhere to be seen.

“Take her up!” the captain yelled, muscles straining, an oil drum hoisted in his arms. Two guards stood behind him, struggling to keep a grip on their own heavy containers.

With a whoosh, the ship rose, fifty feet, a hundred. Jack’s stomach dropped into his boots. The dragon roared and steamed, furious, twisting its body to aim for the dirigible.

Before it could, the captain tipped the oil over the side, a rippling black ribbon the dragon caught and swallowed like a magic trick. It drank and drank until the drum was dry, then emptied the next, and the next. Flecks of oil spattered its eyes, its snout. But its great metal body shuddered and seemed to calm, wings almost lazy with content, swooping and drifting away from the ship and past the next peak until it was gone.

Jack peeled his fingers from the wheel. They were shaking. He looked at the Lady, who was most definitely smiling now. She wasn’t afraid because she couldn’t die, he thought, and Jack himself had never felt quite so alive. He smiled into the wind.

T
HE PALACE WAS
silent, as well it should be. Chimes marking an hour past midnight had rung out from the great clock ten minutes earlier. Jack sat at his window, wide awake, for it had been a very exciting day, what with the dragon and the airship and learning about Mother.

She hadn’t told him everything, he was certain, but there was time enough for that later. He would be her last son, though she did not know it yet, the last of the perfect children brought through the doorway to live in this marvelous world.

Marvelous . . . for the moment. And if he didn’t peer too closely down to the street, where people gasped and
wheezed through their grilles and metal lungs, hobbled on feet in desperate need of oiling.

Where people were hanged.

Inside
the palace it was marvelous. His dragon, which now seemed positively tiny in comparison to the enormous one of the mountains, flapped above, its belly full, its snorts ones of lazy contentment.
Harleye Street was a bit marvelous, too,
he thought, pressing his nose to the glass to see if he could spot it, out there in the maze of homes and factories, asleep beneath a blanket of soot.

Bang.

Jack jumped, turned to look around the room, but everything was in place, quiet. Ears strained, he listened for noises beyond the door, but nothing came.

Scrape.

“H-hello?”

There was no answer. Lorcan’s pointed face flashed through Jack’s mind, scowling and mean. Only it was not Lorcan who appeared suddenly in the hearth, stepping carefully around coals that had cooled hours since.

“Beth!”

“’Lo, Jack,” she said, hopping out onto the carpet. Jack wasn’t sure where to look first—at her, or the door just shut behind her, seamless and invisible in the smoke-blackened brick.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, surprise making him sound rude when he didn’t mean to. “Is that a secret passageway?”

“The doctor expressly forbade me to come, which gave me the idea,” said Beth, hopping neatly up to perch on the edge of Jack’s bed. “Got a barrow boy to wind me up so’s I could stay awake. Them passageways are all over the palace, if you know where to look, and I always had lots of time to explore when the Lady was having one of her wee fits. There’s a few spots in and out. Might’ve bent a hinge squeezing in,” she finished, inspecting a finger.

“The doctor told you not to?” Jack frowned.

“Wasn’t best pleased that you’d run off in the middle of the night, even if you did leave a note,” Beth said with a shrug. “He’ll calm down soon enough. We saw you at the parade, all fancy on the ship.”

So they
had
been there. Jack relaxed and grinned at Beth. Now that she was here, he knew he’d missed her a great deal more than he’d wanted to admit to himself, and could not admit to Mother or Lorcan or even Arabella. “Show me,” he said, pointing to the hearth.