Clockwork Heart: Clockwork Love, Book 1 (24 page)

So did Val, clutching his chest as his shirt and waistcoat stained with blood.

Crying out, Conny caught him, applying pressure to the wound as he wept over his longest friend, who now stared up at him in shock. All around them chaos reigned, the soldiers hesitating as their officers sputtered and died, and the pirates took quick advantage of this. Princess Gisa barked out demands, explaining what she’d meant to say when the archduke was still alive, that the Society to Liberate Europe had arrived with their armed escorts and their intent to seize control of the keep and the command of the war itself. The French Army had lost. The Society was about to carry the day.

All the while, in Conny’s arms, Valentin bled out.

“Oh, Val—” Conny choked on his sob as he pressed harder on the bleeding area, unable to deny how close it had come to the heart. Likely damaging a major aorta. He had almost no time. All because Conny could not bear to take a life. Because he had hesitated like a coward. Because he had failed them all.

Val raised a hand weakly, his fingers barely brushing Conny’s face, though his glazed gaze lingered. “No. Don’t…look like that. I never meant to let you push the trigger. You—” He broke off, coughing, blood coming out of the side of his mouth. “You wouldn’t be Conny, if you killed so many men.”

“But I don’t want to lose you,” Conny whispered.

Félix crouched beside him, assessing Val with a surgeon’s eye. “If we can get him onto a Lazarus, we can keep him alive long enough to sort out his injuries.”

Conny shook his head, biting his lip. “It’s his heart, Félix. I’d have to build him a new one. They take
time
, as you well know, and my lab has been destroyed. We need far more time than we can afford to have him on the Lazarus.”

Crawley appeared on Cornelius’s other side. He looked pale and distraught, unable to take his gaze from dying Valentin. “Why can’t you take one from the dead officers?”

“The hearts were ruined by the pulse I sent.” He clamped a hand over his mouth. “My darling Val, I’m so sorry.”

Johann put his clockwork hand on Conny’s shoulder. “Can he use mine?”

Conny shook his head, ready to explain
no one
could live that long on a Lazarus alone, but Félix eyed Johann speculatively. “He has the original, not your copies. It has the best, rarest metals in its interior. It’s been improved by the both of us, and tempered by Johann’s use. It’s strong. Strong enough to beat, at least for a short while, for two. They would both have to be under aether, and it would have to take turns pumping for each of them. Two Lazarus machines. Two patients. One heart. And an incredible amount of surgeon skill.”

The idea of the men he loved most in the world having their lives hang in the balance made Conny want to vomit. But Val was fading before him, and Johann crouched beside him, looking Conny earnestly in the eye. Waiting to be given his orders.

Conny wiped away more tears. “None of this would have happened had I not hesitated.”

“No,” Crawley said. “We were cruel to leave it in your hand. Our intention was never to have to follow through, but we shouldn’t have relied on the Society’s arrival. We should have had a dummy transmitter in your hand and a real one in someone else’s. Val was right, you never should have had this burden. And it would have been you dying, if you’d looked ready to make the move. They’d have shot whoever put their finger on that button. The only reason Val made it was because they didn’t see him coming.” Crawley nodded at Conny, the glib curtness of his tone belying the stricken look in his eyes. “Stop taking the weight of the whole war on your shoulders and do what you do best, tinker. Fix it. Fix our Frenchie.”

Conny drew a steadying breath. He glanced around again, saw Gisa had the room in hand, that some of the Society members and their soldiers had begun to enter the lab. The castle was seized, the battle won.

Now all that was left was to heal.

He straightened, drew a steadying breath and nodded to a large cabinet across the room. “There’s a Lazarus in there, and we’ll likely find another in Savoy’s lab.” Keeping one hand on Val’s wound, he grabbed Johann’s face and kissed him hard on the mouth. “You will not die, do you hear me?
You will not die.
”

“Not unless you tell me to,” Johann promised.

Chapter Eighteen

In t
he ruined remains of the room where he’d been held prisoner, with his father lying dead on the floor beneath a sheet, Cornelius Francis Stevens performed the most technical, terrifying and tender surgery of his life.

He’d had curtains set up to enclose them in their corner of the room, but there was no escaping the activity near the door, where Society officials and their underlings moved bodies, set up makeshift floorboards where they’d been blown away, and in general cleaned up after the mess. Princess Gisa did what she could to keep them quiet, but it was difficult.

Cornelius tried not to care, tried to focus on his work. It was easy enough when he was tending to Johann or Val, because while he checked their vitals or adjusted who between them used the heart and who used the Lazarus, he thought of the two of them and how humbled he was by their sacrifices, of how much he loved them both. When he returned to his worktable and helped Master Félix build Valentin’s new heart, however, the gravity of it all overwhelmed him.

“Hush, lad. Focus on your work, and let the rest of it go. There will be time enough to dwell on things when the boys are sewn up again.”

Conny understood his mentor was right, but he still couldn’t bring his mind to heel. He was never like this in surgery. Even when he’d installed Johann’s heart, committing seven kinds of treason, he hadn’t faltered. But he hadn’t been in love with Johann then. He hadn’t been racing to save Valentin’s life, who had arguably just put his life on the line for his country—for Europe—in a manner incomparable by any of her other citizens.

Now their lives were, literally, in Conny’s trembling hands.

The hearts he’d made under duress were serviceable and everything he’d promised his father they would be—but Félix was right, there was nothing to compare to the original Johann carried. Conny would only consider something as good or better for Val, which meant he and Félix built slowly, consulting one another over their designs, combing the castle for suitable materials. Some of it had to be brought in from parts beyond. Princess Gisa sent the swiftest couriers, and Crawley flew them personally in the
Farthing
, but meanwhile Conny and Félix worked, trading shifts to sleep and eat and, occasionally for Conny, stand on a balcony and stare into the Alps to see if the majesty of the mountains could provide him with calm.

On one of these occasions, the princess came to stand with him. At first she said nothing, only gazed with him with an appreciative eye for the landscape. Eventually, however, she spoke.

“It is comforting, this view. The craggy peaks know nothing of the cruelty and horror your father planned for the world they oversee. They have lived through and forgotten ten thousand tyrants and madmen. They have harbored ten thousand saints. In the end, they remain mountains. They are constant where we all fade away.”

Conny leaned into a pillar supporting the balcony’s overhang. “Even the mountains will pass on someday. The mountains in the eastern Americas were once towering giants, but now they are little more than hills.”

“Fair point and a more poetic thought.” She glanced at him, her expression uncharacteristically gentle. “You seem to be having difficulty surrendering your cares to the mountains or gods of any mettle. What ails you, Mr. Stevens?”

He sighed. “I don’t know. That’s the trouble. I don’t think it’s anything in particular. I suppose it’s that ever since I brought Johann into my life, everything has been chaos. Clearly it would have come to this in some way regardless—more grisly, to be honest, because without him I would not have found the
Farthing
crew and by extension you and the Society. I would have died my father’s slave.”

He indulged in a glance backward to the castle, toward the laboratory where Val and Johann lay waiting. “All I’ve ever wanted was to help people. To do good. To love and be loved. It upsets me that there are people in the world like my father. That
my father
was the worst of those kind of people.” He threw up his hands. “Why are there men like him? Why must people be so cruel?”

“Because people are complex and wonderful and terrible. You may create the most intricate clockwork in the world, power it by my electricity, turn your clockwork heart into the most incredible machine a human has ever built. But nothing you or I or anyone alive will ever make can compare to humans themselves. To allow us to be as kind and pure-hearted as you are, we must allow ourselves also to be as cold and cruel as your father. There is no world in which one exists without the other—unless it is a world where we are all reduced to your father’s terrible human automatons.”

The princess’s words, while ringing of truth, brought him little comfort. “I wish to be done with the likes of my father. Forever.”

“Alas, I suspect your life will always put more than your fair share of those type of men and women in your way. Which is why I suggest focusing your energies on restoring two of the people who most help you alleviate the pain of dealing with the monsters.” She put a hand on his shoulder, a simple but substantial presence. “You cannot erase the darkness. But you may bring as many candles with you into it as you like.”

Those words, at last, penetrated his fog of fear and helplessness. She was right. His candles lay in his laboratory. They had stood beside him through every dark cavern, supporting him, advising him, carrying him. Now they had both offered their lives for him.

He would give them their lives back. Better and brighter than they had ever hoped to know. Then he would do everything he could to keep both of them by his side, lover and friend, forever.

It had been two days since they began working when Gisa spoke to him on the balcony, and there would be three more before the Lazarus was removed and both men could rise on their own power, but from that moment forward Cornelius worked with a focus and intensity he had never known before. He built Val’s new heart not haunted by terror or fearing what other horrors the world might have in store, but determined to give his friend an engine the world would find it difficult to challenge. When he and Félix discovered an improvement over the original design, he gave the upgrades to Johann’s heart as well. They would both, he insisted, rise from their surgeries with his skills and his love fused inside their hearts.

Rise they did. Slowly, groggily, a week of aether and clockwork surgery exacting its toll. But when they saw him, they smiled and reached for him.

Conny took each of their hands, kissed their knuckles and sat patiently, waiting for them. His two candles, Valentin and Johann, who he knew, once they were healed and rested, would go with him into any darkness. And he, Conny vowed, would always be there to make sure they were more healthy and able-bodied than anyone else on Earth.

Chapter Nineteen

November,
1910

Alcochete, Portugal

On a lazy afternoon while the rest of the crew of
The Brass Farthing
sat joking and teasing one another in a bistro across the street, Johann pressed Conny’s head farther out the window of their third-story rented room as he fucked his lover enthusiastically from behind.

It had been some time now since they left the chaos and pain they both associated with their homelands, but Johann had learned his Cornelius fared better when he was well-fucked, which meant indulging his need for exposure. He intended to take Conny to a private party tonight, one Crawley and the others planned to attend as well, but in the meantime the window had presented itself so handily, and it was the sort of neighborhood that wouldn’t be shocked by much of anything.

When they finished, they curled together on the bed, which had been terrible when they arrived but was quite comfortable now, between the fresh linens and featherbed Johann had brought in and the tinkering Cornelius had provided.

Conny traced circles in the whorls of hair over Johann’s chest, lingering on the edge of the flesh door concealing the opening to his clockwork heart. “I received another transmission from Princess Gisa today. She says the Austrian Emperor has tripled the offer for me to be the official court tinker. He’s made us both barons and issued official pardons for both your desertions of the army.”

Johann kissed Conny’s hair and smoothed his clockwork hand down his lover’s back. “Are you interested in accepting?”

“Oh, heavens, no. With all the work we’ve put in to making our suite on the ship? Besides, it’s exciting to never stay in the same place. I’d be bored in a week in Vienna.” He sighed. “Though it would be lovely to work with the princess again.”

“Any further word on the Society?”

“Nothing more than we read in the papers. France is in chaos. Germany, Poland and Spain have broken away, and Brittany is considering forming its own government as well. There was a small hint about Emperor Éloi stepping down, but I think the Society would rather let him fade away. Put the focus on the parliament. And of course the dismantling of the army.”

Johann kissed Conny’s neck, urging him onto his belly. He worked the tension out of that slender back with the meat of his flesh palm and the gentle kneading of his clockwork. “Would you like to visit Calais again? Crawley was hinting we might travel to England next. It would be easy to arrange a night away over the Channel.”

“I don’t know. Yes, because I miss the sight of it, the familiar feel of the cobblestones beneath my feet. No, because it won’t be the same, and it might make me sad.”

Johann trained his left hand over Conny’s buttocks and teased the tender opening between them. “What if I promised to take you to The Alison, get you drunk on absinthe and fuck you over a table while friends and strangers fight one another to be the one who feeds you their cock?”

Conny shivered with pleasure and pushed his bottom into Johann’s hand. “When did you say Crawley wanted to leave? Do you think he’d let us stop on the way?”

They made love again, a slower, more lingering encounter which remained entirely on the mattress. After a nap, they wandered to the dock where the
Farthing
waited, because Cornelius insisted he wanted to see his lady.

Though the manifest still listed Crawley as the owner, every pirate in Europe knew the soul of the airship now belonged to its tinker. She was leaner now, her gondola’s bottom shaved and shaped, her casing made of reinforced aluminum, which allowed for more cargo
and
individual rooms for each member of the crew. All but Conny and Johann, who’d turned their space into a series of open chambers, complete with an elegant clawfoot bathtub fitting two. Especially when one of the men had removable legs.

But the true glory of the
Farthing
was her balloon. It was sleek and silver, the hide made of material Johann didn’t understand except to know it was beautiful, shining even when the sun was behind the clouds. It had elegant brass casing, intricately molded filigree and curves making her the envy of air and sea.

She shone bright and proud as Johann and Conny approached, snug in her berth, moored and secured with electric locks no thieves could hope to crack. Conny leaned against Johann as they regarded the ship across the street.

“Crawley keeps offering to cancel our contracts if we want, but to be honest, Johann, I don’t ever want to go to Calais or anywhere else to stay.” He turned in Johann’s arms to look at him, touching his face. “What about you, darling? Do you have any wish to go home?”

Johann kissed Cornelius’s hand and smiled as the evening sun set his lover’s hair alight with fire to match the glint of the
Farthing
’s gilded casing, his face full of joy and peace and years of promised adventure.

“I’m already there.”