Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables (25 page)

L
ate one evening, the prince slipped through the shadows and into Zellandyne’s workshops. True to his word, he had not approached her, and had in fact gone to some efforts to prevent her from even getting a good look at him. Not that it was so difficult to do—the princess kept mostly to her labors, and associated more with her maids and assistants than anyone else in the palace. In point of fact, he’d dined nightly with the king and queen, and had yet to be sent from the table because the princess had never come to claim her place.

He walked softly among the hanging chains and great racks of the workshops. Banked fires glowered through shuttered grates, while burbling and
glooping
noises testified to chemical and
thermal activities with the tanks that loomed along the outer walls of the workshop. He touched nothing, but observed everything with his trained eye.

In the third of the stone barns, he found what he was looking for. This was where she’d done the fine work of building her automata. Shelves were lined with springs and torsion bars, gyroscopes and bins of close-cut gears, the leathers and gutta-percha that would go to make a skin or covering.

On a great slab of a table in the middle of the workshop lay the mostly complete body of a brass man. He was visible in one of the few pools of lamplight shining in the shuttered night shift. The chest was open and the face was missing, leaving a complex tangle of clockwork and pressure hoses and spark relays. Puissant walked slowly around it, still looking without touching.

“He is beautiful, is he not?” The voice rang out from the shadows, strong, confident. Female.

“Yes, Your Highness,” the prince replied, not very surprised. “Your work is well spoken of within the palace.”

“I doubt that. When they speak of me, it is with despair.” She stepped into the light, dressed in a smith’s leathers with thick denim and canvas beneath. He could not help noticing that one hand held a hammer, rock-steady and ready to swing. “You are that prince, from Bourgoigne.”

“Prince Puissant, at your service.” He bowed.

She snorted. “Your parents really named you that?”

Another bow, this time with a smile he could not keep from his face. “My mother is…ambitious. Most people do not seem to get the joke.”

“My parents are desperate,” she said flatly. “And the joke here has grown very old. Are you commissioned to somehow free me from the curse?”

“Alas, no,” Puissant said. “I merely stopped to attend awhile on my way home from a journey of years.”

Her free hand strayed to the brow of the brass man on the table. “It must have been quite a journey, for you to be away for years.”

“An ambitious mother can be an inspiration.”

“So can a fae curse.”

The prince nodded at the man on the table. “You are creating your own true love?”

Her lips grew tight. “Perhaps. It seems one way to avoid the curse.”

“Is brass exempted from the failures of flesh?”

“In many ways, yes.” She glanced down at the exposed gears and circuits behind the missing face. “And perhaps more obedient.”

“Somehow I do not think it is obedience that concerns you most,” he said.

“I have been taught to love forge fires and tools and machines.” Her voice grew distant. “For fear of what a young man might do to me.”

There are places in this world where you might have loved a young woman,
Puissant thought, but he did not see it as a helpful thing to say. “Your loves are your own business,” he replied quietly. “I confess to curiosity, but this is not my affair.”

“I
will
build him, and I
will
kiss him.”

“And sleep the centuries until a brass man has walked his last step upon this Earth?”

Her face grew fierce. “He is brass. This will be different.”

“Luck and love to you, Princess,” Puissant said with sadness.

H
e bade his farewells the next morning, and took his horse down into Talos City. Prince Puissant had had enough of the gloom of the Royal Palace, and his heart was pierced by the idea of love. In the years of his wanderings, he had known the flesh of both women and men when time and interest permitted. Those had been pleasant pastimes, but they were not love.

Here was a woman denied to love almost from her birth, but she was still trying to find a way past that sentence. He should possess such fortitude.

So Puissant made his way to a middling sort of traveler’s inn, ordered himself copious wine and a small feast and two whores, and set about some serious effort at forgetting himself for a while.

On the third day of his dissolution, he woke amid a tangle of limbs and a reek of alcohol to hear bells ringing throughout the town, and the muttering of a crowd in the street. Or possibly a mob. The prince extracted himself from Maisie and Daisy—which might just possibly be their real names, though he was doubtful—and cracked open the shutters.

People were gathering in uneasy groups, with much pointing and shouting. He leaned out to look in the direction many fingers were indicating to see a gray pall just west of town, where the Royal Palace of Talos stood atop its long, sloping hill.

“She has done something,” whispered the prince. He quickly donned his riding leathers and the lightest of armor, took up his sword and pistols, and leaving the women asleep in his room, made his way back down to the stables where he’d left Lightning. Puissant had ridden a brass horse for the seasons he’d been in Venice, and much preferred the fleshly versions.

He quickly checked his horse’s hooves and hocks, then saddled without the help of the stable boys, who’d run off to gawk like everyone else. Then he was up and heading for the Royal Palace, pushing his way through the uneasy streets where the townsfolk were still working up their courage.

T
he grounds were a mess as he approached. Not that this had been the best-kept estate he’d ever visited, but overnight every growing thing seemed to have bolted and become leggy, woody and strange. The walls were unguarded, but the main gate was a tangle of fresh vines and tiny, wild roses everywhere.

Puissant dismounted and hacked his way through the entrance. Leading Lightning, he walked up the moss-covered stones of the paved drive to the formal entrance of the Royal Palace. Not even a bird twittered in the trees. The place was eerily silent. The great lacquered doors were ajar, draped again with vines and roses. A brass man was collapsed on the generous portico, resembling nothing so much as an abandoned suit of armor.

Tying off his horse, Prince Puissant pushed his way within.
He came across a maid in the front hall, curled on her side and sleeping deeply. He tried to rouse her, but nothing he could do, not even pricking the back of her hand with the tip of his dagger, provoked the slightest reaction other than a slow, carmine bead of blood. He walked on to the throne room, which he found empty except for two more servants, then to the main dining room. The king and queen were slumped over their golden plates, servants and members of the court scattered around them on the floor.

With a sigh, Puissant headed for Zellandyne’s workshop. Surely that was the center of all this. The exits from the Royal Palace were blocked with more vines and roses, and his hand was torn by thorns on the way out. Likewise the entrances to the workshops. He apologized silently to his sword for the abuse, and hacked his way within.

Zellandyne lay on the floor next to her slab table. Of the brass man, there was no sign. The princess was accompanied in unconsciousness by several assistants, all strapping young women with arms as mighty as hers.

“You had to do it,” the prince said. “And sadly, you were wrong about the brass man.” He looked at her face and wondered if he was supposed to kiss her. Since the most likely outcome of that seemed to be him joining the princess and everyone else in the palace in the sleep of years, he decided against it. Besides, there was no spark between them.

He went looking for the brass man instead.

P
uissant found Zellandyne’s true love in the stables, fumbling to light the fires of a steam cart. All the horses were asleep, of course. “Must you leave?”

The brass man turned to face him. “There is nothing for me here.”

“A hundred people or more sleep at the touch of your lips,” the prince said. “Surely you have some responsibilities.”

“She made me as she was made, she quickened me as she was
quickened, she kissed me as her mother had once kissed her.” The brass man’s voice was dull. “Then they all just…folded away.”

“Did Zellandyne give you a name before she was lost?”

“Morpheus.”

The prince had to laugh at that. “Well, Morpheus, what do you plan for yourself now?”

“To go into the world and find a purpose.” The brass man glanced at the prince’s sword, now sheathed again at his side. “What are your plans?”

“To free the princess, then be about my business,” he said. “She will never forgive me for slaying her true love.” He drew one of his pistols and in one swift movement shot the brass man in his left knee.

Morpheus collapsed with a piteous hissing whine. “I did nothing to you,” he complained.

“I have warred around the edges of the Mediterranean these past fifteen years,” the prince told him. “I have personally killed dozens who did nothing to me, caused the deaths of hundreds or even thousands more who did nothing to me, slain at the hands of men I led. Innocence is no badge of protection.” He aimed the other pistol at Morpheus’s face. “Besides, there is some sin here to expiate, or I am no judge of people. They all suffer from a curse, and it’s not just this silly business with the witch. You, my poor newborn friend, are the lamb to be sacrificed on their altar.”

He fired the other pistol into the brass man’s face with only a single shudder of self-disgust. Then he went to find a hammer and a pry bar to tear Morpheus apart, until Zellandyne’s first love was no more.

P
uissant thought about attending until the sleeping beauty awoke, but the palace stirred slowly in the aftermath of the murder. He’d broken the curse, and the king and queen had lost not even a day of their lives. They could not have done the same to free themselves, because of course what use to slay the true love before their daughter’s heart was grasped? He knew he should
congratulate himself on his cleverness, but the prince felt no pride, and likewise no desire to claim any reward.