Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times (23 page)

But Jack’s steps faltered only a little.

A figure waited for them at the mouth of the bridge, jaw shining.

“Do tell me why I had cold water poured on my head in the dead of night, Mephisto,” said Xeno, stamping the snow from his boots. “Some of us enjoy our sleep.”

The doctor leaned upon the railing over the river, breath coming in alarming gasps. Perhaps they should have hailed a carriage, or taken one of the trains that rumbled below. But Jack’s regret was forgotten as he turned to Xeno.

“I know where the Gearwing is,” Jack said. Immediately, Xeno appeared to have been awake for hours.

“Dragged . . . halfway across . . . dead of night,” gasped the doctor. “For this . . . nonsense.”

“It’s
not
nonsense,” Jack insisted, turning slowly. He tilted his head to the unusually clear sky, pointing up. “It’s the clock. I didn’t think of it when you first told the story, but you have to believe me. I’ve seen it. Not just in the crystal ball. I’ve
seen
it.”

He was going to go home. Happiness bubbled through him, fizzy as bright, sunny sherbet lemons. “A clock is just parts. All little parts, big ones. What matters is how they’re put together.”

They had to see for themselves. Without a word, Jack took off for the base of the tower. There were no guards this time, just the plain wooden door with a round brass handle.

And a lock. Jack slumped. Of course there would be, and he’d been daft not to think of it.

Without a word, Xeno slipped around him, pulling something needle thin and glinting from a tattered pocket. The
click
seemed dreadfully, shockingly loud; Jack jumped and turned to look past Beth and the doctor. No one else was anywhere in sight, all sensibly in their homes, huddled up for warmth.

“After you,” said Xeno grandly, ushering Jack inside. It was just as he remembered, the dark room and the door leading to the stairs. Faint light came in through the windows, which made climbing as much a matter of feeling as seeing. Jack heard Dr. Snailwater’s strained breath, Beth’s clickety knees, Xeno’s footsteps right behind him.

Ears straining, he listened for sounds overhead, but none came. None but rhythmic, ticking movement.

His head ached with remembering how many doors he’d
passed before he came to the enormous clock on that day so many months before. Higher and higher they went, until they could feel the frigid air blowing down from the belfry directly overhead, open to the skies.

“In here,” Jack said, mouth dry. The room was pitch-black, scented with grease. Of course Lorcan would keep it running, a smooth, oiled trap, the Gearwing a bird in a cage fashioned of itself.

“I can’t see a blind thing,” said Beth. There was a tapping sound as someone—Xeno or the doctor, Jack couldn’t guess—felt along the wall and the snap of a sparkmaker held to a lamp. The flame burst to life, casting golden shadows across the floor, bouncing off the huge clockwork mechanism, half as big as the room.

“Oh,” Beth breathed. “Oh.”

It was all there, or nearly so, and Jack had the answer for the other parts, knowing the question would come. A clock, yes, but even now, looking at it through the eyes of all he’d learned in the Empire, he could see that cog as part of a leg, that gear the center of a wing.

Xeno gazed at it, aglow as a man possessed. “The whole time,” he whispered. “Right here under our noses. Or above them, really.”

“It used to break,” said Jack to himself. “When I first came, someone told me it was broken, but it was only
broken here, not on the other side of the door. It broke again just before the hangings began. I think he went back to London then. He didn’t like to leave it whole and working when he was somewhere he couldn’t see it, but he has to have it running when he’s here because that’s part of the magic of it. When he was in my house he had bits of it in his pocket. I know because he dropped them and I picked one up.”

What a very long time ago that had been.

There was more. Finally, Jack let go of his last secrets, explaining how, in London, Lorcan had waited for the clock to chime twelve so that he could open the doorway. The voice, the horrible voice,
Lorcan’s
voice, the description of which made Dr. Snailwater whiten beneath his reddened, sweaty face. The voice that was the thought which had nagged at Jack like an itch, because this was one of the powers of the Gearwing and he hadn’t truly grasped it straightaway. Most of all, the curious behavior of the soul in the brandy bottle, how it had argued with Xeno’s, because he’d caught it and so, for a time, had two souls instead of the more normal one.

“Lorcan’s
using
it somehow,” said Jack, aware that he probably sounded quite mad now. “It’s how he can talk inside my head—anyone’s, probably, if he wants to. Because the Gearwing can do that, you said. And it’s why he’s never
died. He’s never let this fall apart, like it’s s’posed to, so it stays alive when it shouldn’t, like him. Only it’s a bit dead, at the same time, too, because it’s not itself now.”

Magic you cannot conceive of.

The Lady knew. Perhaps she had been the one to tell Lorcan of the Gearwing, or discovered his secret only after he’d done this awful thing. But he’d told her it was destroyed, which wasn’t quite true.

“He’s an evil, murdering—” Xeno paused, then said something that would’ve earned him a right hiding from Mrs. Pond, no matter how old he was. He reached out to lay a hand on one of the gears. “Ah, you poor creature.”

All together, the four inspected the workings, crouched down and leaning over as it ticked slowly on. It was beautiful like this, as a clock, Jack thought. Terribly, tragically beautiful and wrong. Like turning his lovely little dragon into a teakettle, but so very much worse.

Beth wandered from the room, up a short flight of stairs. The clock gave a loud, shuddering
thunk,
and Jack followed her just in time to see the hammer strike the grandest bell he had ever seen. Cast iron, big enough for a man to stand in. He clapped his hands over his ears, the chime echoing through his brain.

Once. Twice. A third time. The hammer stopped.

“That,” said Beth, “was extremely loud.”

Jack couldn’t answer. His teeth were still wobbling. Above the largest bell were four smaller ones, still nearly bigger than Jack, to ring the quarters. All hung from the roof, but wind blew in from the open sides of the belfry. Jack crept to the edge, the city spread below. Plumes of steam shot up here and there; lamplight shone. An automaton, small as a beetle from this great height, cleared a street of snow. On the other side, the river slugged along, chunks of ice brushing together only to drift apart again.

The doctor and Xeno had joined them to marvel at the bell, but the doctor’s face was screwed up in thought.

“Hold up,” he said. “Where’s the feathers?”

Triumph flashed through Jack. “The hands, on the faces, and the bits that mark the minutes. You can’t see them half the time anyhow; everything’s usually covered in clouds. Nobody noticed.” And why would they? Choking, sooty disease got them all too soon. Barely anyone would remember the clock’s construction. To most, it was the same as it had always been.

“All right,” said Dr. Snailwater. “I’m a man of evidence; it may be true, as you say, but we can’t go taking apart the thing just because we think we could build a daft great bird from it for lack of a better way to spend the afternoon, even if it will send you home. Which remains to be seen, regardless. We certainly can’t carry it down piece by piece.”

No, that’d take ages. Someone would notice before they were halfway done. But Jack had thought of this already, and he had a plan. He simply needed Arabella’s help.

•  •  •

Waiting for Arabella to come, Jack imagined he could feel every tick of the clock. Every second, trapped in a place, a shape, it shouldn’t be. And with each minute, his anger grew at all the horrible things Lorcan had done. The hangings, and keeping Jack in the Empire, and his hand, and the Gearwing, and so much more besides. Jack had taken to carrying a pair of the doctor’s binoculars around his neck everywhere he went, slipping fiendlike through the streets until he could catch a glimpse of the tower.

The clouds had moved in again, heavy and dark. Often, the most he could see was the very bottom edge of the clock face turned to him.

Three days passed before Arabella was able to slip from the Lady’s clutches for an hour. She arrived panting for breath, clutching her side, as if she’d run the whole distance from the palace. A pretty scarf covered her hair and half her face when the doctor answered the knock.

“’Lo, Arabella,” said Beth, to Jack’s surprise. He’d quite forgotten Beth’s time with the Lady, what with everything else.

Arabella removed her scarf so that they could see her nervous smile. “Hello, Beth, m’duck. I’ve not got long; she’s expecting me back. Thinks I’ve only run to find fresh roses. If someone might tell me why a faery walloped my head until I read this”—she held up a tiny scrap of paper—“I’d much appreciate it.” Her eyes went to Jack’s new hand and softened slightly.

“I’m sorry,” said Jack. He
had
asked Xeno to make sure the faery was a persistent sort. “We—that is, I—need help, and I thought perhaps you would.”

“I daresay that depends what it is.”

He told her.

Her eyes widened. “You cannot just steal one, your lo—Jack! You’ll have half the fleet after you!”

“We need it,” he insisted.

“Might I ask what for?”

“I think it best that you don’t know,” said the doctor from behind Jack. “So that if anyone asks, you can say you had no earthly idea of it.”

Arabella gave the doctor a long look. “This is about getting ’im home, I suspect.” Jack goggled at her, and she smiled again. “It’s a funny thing,” she said, “but when you don’t ask too many questions, people tend to forget you’s in the room. Gives a person lots of time to hear all the answers.”

All his stay at the palace, Jack had liked Arabella, but now he looked at her with a new kind of respect. She was very nice, really, and clever when she wanted to be.

“I’ve gone around the twist,” she said to herself. “But all right. I’ll do as I can. No promises, mind. Things are all a bit funny at the moment.”

Jack swallowed. “How is she?” It made him sad to think the Lady was still upset, no matter how unkind she’d been to him in the end. She was only old, and lonely, and Lorcan had stolen the beautiful gift she had given her Empire. And Mother—his
real
mother—had only been busy, unsure what to do with him when he was home from the school Father insisted he attend. She didn’t know him at all, but he didn’t know her much, either.

Arabella
must
help him.

“Not well,” answered Arabella sadly. “Spends her days shut up in her rooms; only lets me and a few of the other girls in to tidy and bring her supper and whatnot. Oh, it’s been terrible, and she had such a row with Lorcan. She banished him, if you can believe. He ran off with his tail between his legs, and she won’t tell anyone why. They say he’s up in the mountains, and good riddance, too.” She clapped her hand to her mouth.

Jack knew why, but he held his tongue and tried to appear surprised. Better, as the doctor said, that she not
know more than she must. But a small part of the Lady must have believed what Jack had told her about Lorcan, enough to confront him. And Lorcan hadn’t been able to lie to her.

“I liked it at the palace,” said Beth, after Arabella had spied one of the doctor’s small clocks and run out with a yelp. “Sad that the Lady’s all alone now.”

Dr. Snailwater patted her on the head, as he did so often when Beth showed a kindness. There was nothing to do now but wait for Arabella to send word. The doctor tried to keep Jack amused by giving him bits and pieces to do in the workshop, but Jack’s thoughts were ever on the clock that wasn’t. Was it in pain? Did it know, in the way his hand knew what it should be, or was it more like Beth, who felt nothing after Lorcan broke her to bits?

•  •  •

The moon was over the thick clouds when a faery tapped on the window, scrap of paper in hand. Arabella wished them luck. The doctor gave the faery an egg cup of oil and shooed it on its way, for little ears were still capable of listening, and it’d be just like a faery to cause trouble.

Of course, their plans depended on that; it just had to be
their
sort of trouble.

Xeno arrived, arms full of jewel-bright nectars, oils flavored with flowers and spice, which clung to the glass
inside the bottles. Quite the sight they made, a short time later, pushing their way through the thick steam on the train platform and jostling into a compartment. A sack of tools hung from the doctor’s shoulder, weighing it down several inches below the other. Beth smiled at everyone she saw; some smiled absently back, others skulked away.

Jack fiddled impatiently with the knobs on his binoculars.

A short way outside Londinium, the train rose above the ground, chugging through fields frosted black with the last of the snow. It lay in shapeless lumps, large coals that burned with ice, not fire. Even these disappeared the farther south they ventured, so everything—the land, the sky above—was dark gray with night.

They were the only ones to alight at the station listed in Arabella’s note, which was nowhere near a town or a factory, nor anything a person might want to visit. The conductor gave them a curious look through the open window of his carriage, but if an oddly assembled bunch wanted to traipse around the countryside in the dead of night, it was no concern of his.

It wasn’t far to walk, which was perhaps just as well. The tools clanked inside the sack as Dr. Snailwater huffed and puffed, and Jack took an armful of bottles from Xeno after the second time of catching one just before it fell to the ground. Over a hill, through a dark thicket of trees run with nightly creatures whose chatter hinted of iron and steel.