Agatha H. and the Airship City (2 page)

This was the answer, ringing in Agatha’s ears like a chorus of clockwork angels. Impatiently she reached forward, trying to grasp the shifting, glittering thing before her. Something clicked into place in her mind. She began to recognize the patterns forming before her. She realized that all of the surrounding space was beginning to react to the shining thing before her. Of course. The principals involved could be expanded infinitely outwards, therefore—

A vise slammed shut on her mind. A dark tunnel closed in on her perceptions and squeezed the glittering pattern down, down, down to a speck so small she couldn’t see it except as a twinkling mote of light just out of reach. With a sob of desperation Agatha lunged forward to grab it, and—

With a
SMACK,
her hand struck the wall.

The pain snapped her fully awake. She was gasping as if she had run all the way to the University and back, and covered in a sheen of sweat that had soaked her bedding. Her head was a throbbing ball of pain. Gamely she tried to swing out of bed, and almost crashed to the floor. Belatedly she noticed that her muscles were stiff and cramped, and that her blankets were knotted and wrapped around her in a way that told her she must have spun like a top in her sleep. As she began to unwind herself, the headache began to subside. Agatha was a connoisseur of headaches, and was relieved at the transitory nature of this one.

Once free of the bedclothes, Agatha snatched her spectacles from a small shelf and slipped the brass loops over her ears. The world clicked into focus and she was soon at her desk ripping bits off of a small machine, hastily adding others, bending wires and shuffling gears in a frantic attempt to capture the quickly fading memory within the structure of the device.

On an overloaded bookshelf in the corner, a painted metal woodsman struck a golden wolf repeatedly with a miniscule axe. First clock. An enameled couple wearing tiny crowns struck up a mazurka while a chime counted time to their bouncing feet. Second clock. Agatha began to work even more frantically. The beat of the mazurka insinuated itself into the last memories of the dream machine’s song, tangling them up and then sweeping them away in three eighths time.

Agatha growled in frustration and sat back onto her chair with a thump. She blew an errant lock of blonde hair out of her face. Gone. She touched the golden trilobite locket at her throat and sighed.

Getting to her feet, she stripped off the damp nightshirt and stretched in the early morning light that came in through her attic window, past several plants and what appeared to be a small mechanical spider. A variety of prisms caught the light and scattered it throughout the small room. Flashes of bright color glowed against her hair.

On a shelf by the window crammed with devices constructed from wire and fish bones, a small brass mushroom chimed as a cheerful mechanical centipede clog danced around the stalk. That was the third clock, which meant that it really was time to go. She would have to skip breakfast again.

She poured a dollop of water out of the blue ceramic pitcher into her washbowl and quickly washed up. Her skin pebbled in the cold air as she considered the meager contents of her closet. A white linen shirt, and her green tweed skirt and vest. These last had been a birthday present from her parents, and were Agatha’s current favorites. Long striped woolen stockings and a stout pair of boots completed her outfit. Quickly she stripped the sheets from her bed and hung them from the pole that held the bed drape. Then it was down the stairs, grab the large military greatcoat and cap that hung from her hook in the boot room, and through the door of the smithy to the outside world. The device she had cobbled together banging against her thigh through the pocket as she ran down the steps to the street.

She breathed deeply of the crisp cold air and blew out a great cloud of vapor. The sun had barely cleared the city walls and the lamplighters could be seen striding above the cobblestoned street, their stilt suits clacking as they hurried to douse the last few streetlights. It was evident that the city gates had been opened for the day, as the streets of Beetleburg were already full. Carts piled high with everything from produce to machine parts were pulled by horses, oxen and the occasional mechanical construct as they rumbled through the center of the street. On either side, the shops had opened and exposed their wares. The small fried pastries of several different cultures were hawked next to dried fruits and vegetables. Ovens unloaded aromatic platters of fresh bread. Several hundred different types of sausage and an equal number of cheeses were grabbed from hooks and shelves and consumed before the purchaser had gone three meters. Schools of smoked fish and eels hung next to sellers of hot beverages, and everywhere there was a bewildering variety of unclassifiable foodstuffs that were served on sticks.

The people consuming this bounty were a varied group. The great university drew students from all over the known world. Most were garbed against the March cold in what were obviously scrounged military uniforms. The garish colors added a festive note to the cold gray streets. Many were workers, trudging to or from the Tyrant’s factories. Occasionally men from different shifts would meet and stop briefly to pass along news or laugh at a humorous incident. Clumps of students headed towards the great gates of the University. Some groups were engaged in serious debate, others looked like they’d had a bit too much to drink last night.

Agatha was surprised to see a lone Jägermonster strolling casually down the street. People looked at it nervously out of the corner of their eyes, but were determined to act casual… which the monster soldier seemed to find quite amusing, but then, apparently, Jägermonsters found everything amusing. Except when people tried to beg for mercy. That they found downright hilarious.

This one still retained most of its humanity, as far as Agatha could see. Its frame still fit into an obviously scrounged uniform, although its arms were disturbingly long. The face was covered in what appeared to be small spikes, but that didn’t keep it from sporting a large, disturbing grin.

These days the Jägermonsters served Baron Wulfenbach, whose rule currently stretched across most of Europa, but it was unusual to see any forces of the Empire here. Relations between the Tyrant of Beetleburg and the House of Wulfenbach had been cordial ever since the city had been peacefully annexed into the
Pax Transylvania
over a decade ago. In spite of this, Beetleburg continued to be patrolled by the Tyrant’s own mechanical forces. Even now, one quick-stepped around the corner, jogged to the center of the block, stopped, and swiveled twice around its axis, looking for trouble. It registered the Jäger, and with a snap, extruded a pair of guns as it skipped towards it. Agatha always thought the watchmen clanks looked like indignant wind-up toys. Everyone did, really, until they started shooting.

The Jäger went still. The clank stopped three meters away from the monster soldier. There was a hiss, and then a scratchy voice asked the Jäger to slowly and clearly state its business. This should be amusing, thought Agatha. The Jägermonsters carefully cultivated and maintained their original Mechanicsburg accent. There had been numerous instances where clanks or other devices that relied on verbal instructions had, upon hearing it, simply opened fire. This was especially disconcerting when said devices were otherwise harmless household appliances.

Agatha was again surprised, as the soldier fumbled at its belt, and pulled out a crumpled bit of paper. It nervously scrutinized it for a minute, turned it upside down, checked it again and then laboriously stated, “I am coming to… the mar-ket to…” The Jäger was visibly sweating now. “To
buy,
not
schteal
… a piece of… ham.” He looked up expectantly. The entire street had gone still, and Agatha could hear the clacking as wax disks shuffled about inside the steel watchman.

The voicebox crackled to life. “Please move this horse. I believe it is dead.” With that the mechanical soldier swiveled about, and continued on down the street and bobbled around the next corner.

The Jäger blew out a huge sigh of relief, saw Agatha looking at him and gave her a cocky “thumbs up,” before tucking the paper back into the pouch at his belt and strolling on.

As the Jäger passed, the rumble and buzz of the town resumed. Housefraus resumed their dickering over soup bones, peddlers hawked candied fruits and insects, and swarms of children flowed through the crowds shrieking and looking for dropped treasures.

Agatha frowned. It wasn’t the first time that the Tyrant’s clockwork soldiers had made a harmless error, but she had been noticing them more often. Discussing it with the Tyrant, however, had proved fruitless. He frequently avowed that the Clockwork Army that had successfully defended Beetleburg for over thirty years had been declared the finest fighting force in Europa by the Baron himself, and thus wasting time and resources on them was unnecessary. Still, Agatha had heard stories about the battle clanks that the Baron’s armies used, and more and more she had found herself thinking about ways Beetleburg’s defenders could be improved—until a quick, sharp blossom of pain behind her eyes ended the chain of thought. It never failed.

Massaging her brow, Agatha found her progress was suddenly slowed by a crowd of people clustered in front of her. Focusing, she saw that she was in front of the familiar windows of the local booksellers. The display inside explained the crowd, a new Heterodyne Boys novel had arrived, and people were in line waiting for the shop to open. A card in the window displayed the title:
The Heterodyne Boys and the Mystery of the Cast Iron Glacier.
That sounded promising. Agatha made a mental note to put her name down on the request list at the university library. Agatha’s parents disliked the Heterodyne Boys novels, and refused to permit them in the house.

People in the bookstore line were eagerly discussing the book, analyzing the cover art, or just reminiscing about the actual Heterodyne Boys themselves.

Passions were easily aroused by this, even though the Heterodyne Boys had vanished over fifteen years ago. Things were a lot quieter now, the older people constantly reminded the younger generation, but before the Baron had imposed the Pax Transylvania, all of Europa had been a crazy quilt of kingdoms ruled by Sparks, embattled royalty, or any number of improbable and unstable combinations thereof. If a mad scientist wasn’t at war with at least two of his neighbors, it was because he had his back to the sea, and even then he had to watch out for an invasion of intelligent sea urchins. The populace at large was used mostly as soldiers, laborers, bargaining chips, or in some of the worst cases, monster chow. Into this nightmare world had come the Heterodynes, a pair of Sparks who had taken on the Sisyphean task of stopping the more malignant despots, a task which seemed to involve battling an endless stream of monsters, clanks, armies of various species, and the insane madmen who’d created them.

Now there was a legitimate school of thought that held that the Heterodynes did not actually accomplish all that much. They were, when all was said and done, just two men, two incredibly gifted Sparks accompanied by an ever-changing coterie of friends, assistants and fellow adventurers to be sure, but they could only do so much. The world produced a never-ending supply of dangerous creatures, as well as the scientists who had spawned them. But the point wasn’t that they had taken down the diabolical Doctor Doomfrenzy and his giant moss-bees, it was that there was someone actively out there, in the world, trying to make said world a better place, and in some small, measurable way, succeeding. They gave people hope, when hope was in desperately short supply.

And because of this, people remembered them as heroes. Almost everyone over a certain age could recite an incident that had, in some way, touched them personally. As she moved through the crowd, Agatha heard the old arguments about how the world would be better if the Heterodyne Boys were still around, as well as the fervent assurances that one day, Bill and Barry would return and make everything better, starting with the price of oats.

By the time Agatha cleared the crowd and hit the Street of the Cheesemongers, she had slowed to a walk and was once again deep in the mists of her own thoughts. Her feet followed the route to the University automatically, which brought her near the institution’s great bronze gates.

The answer she’d glimpsed in her dream was still there, somewhere in her head. If she concentrated, she could almost visualize the correct assembly that would make her little machine actually work. Almost… and then the order of the parts would muddle and blur, the formulae would lose themselves in the murk of her mind and her head would feel as though it were filled with honey—thick and comforting, but impossible to work through. If she could just filter out all of the distractions… She unconsciously hummed a few notes… trying to sharpen her mental sight and cut through the sticky thoughts…

She was so busy chasing ideas around her own head that she didn’t notice the cries of surprise from the people around her, or the electrical smell on the air. A small arc of blue electricity leaping from the metal rims of her glasses to her nose brought her back to the present and she gave a small yelp.

And then a hole in the sky opened up. A huge silver figure pointed the accusation at her as an unearthly voice rang out: “—LIKE THAT?”

In his long military career, Machinist Second Class Moloch von Zinzer had sampled quite a wide variety of alcoholic concoctions. In good times they were made from potatoes, grapes, or sometimes barley. However, in his experience, decent brews could be wrung from wheat, oats, rye, honey, pears, melons, corn, apples, berries, turnips, seaweed, sorghum, sugar beets, buckwheat, zucchini, rice, yams, sunflowers, artichokes, cattails or giant mushrooms. It was sort of a hobby, and one that made him popular with his fellows.

One used what one was able to scrounge, which meant that the drinks were usually brewed up on spare bits of madboy equipment, so occasionally the stuff was blue, or caused you to grow an extra set of ears, but it usually got the job done. But this—this was a new low. He looked at the crudely printed label on the bottle in his hand. “Beetle Beer” it proclaimed. Fair enough, he thought, I can believe that.