Winterspell (18 page)

High above them, in the distance, steel lattices wove through the sky. A faint line of motion, there, on that curving black bridge—yet another train, this one sleeker, blinking. Train whistles filled the air, a discordant symphony. Against the churning blue-green storm clouds, dark birds circled, but they did not move like ordinary birds. They were quieter, more precise. When one of them perched atop a pole from which tangles of wires stretched every which way, Clara saw near its long beak bright eyes, blinking blue.

And beneath the lights lay a pile of a city. Even from here Clara could smell its stink—sweat, and fish, and flesh. Crumbling brick buildings; long, low warehouses of dark stone. Brightly lit signs flashed foreign words in a thousand different colors. At the city's edge a canal of black water glistened, topped with crude, rusted bridges. Hovels clustered at their bases, sagging shantytown villages. Fresh snow frosted everything; dirty snow lined the gutters, the railroad, the water.

From within the din of trains came a murmuring roar of shouting, movement, music.

Laughter.

Screams.

People were everywhere—crossing the bridges, hanging laundry from rooftops, peddling wares from street carts. Some were dark and some were pale, and some were faeries, patrolling on loks.

Past the canal a tall, slender building shuddered. A rolling wave of black surged across it. Horror fluttered in Clara's throat at the sight. Nicholas flinched and grabbed her hand—to protect her, or himself?

“The mechaniks?” she whispered.

“Watch them” was his terse reply.

Shrieks sounded from within the building, and the entire structure collapsed, like a child's tower of blocks being knocked to the ground in a fit of pique. The debris rumbled blackly and then surged upward, reforming, rebuilding. When silence fell, a new building stood in its place—taller, serrated, elaborate, embellished with pillars and balconies, porticoes and minarets and winged iron figures with lolling tongues. Bridges lashed off the building and affixed themselves to the buildings adjacent.

Was that an echo of delicate laughter, winding delightedly through the air?

Before Clara could get a fix on it, it had stopped. Wails of grief rose in the distance, but everything else was still. If they had exited the tunnel a few minutes later, she would have thought that building had always stood there.

The blue-eyed bird rustled its feathers. They clanged together, suspiciously metallic; it squawked and flew away.

Clara felt faint and unbalanced; she did not want to think of what had happened to anyone inside that building. And Nicholas's face, to her dismay, was that of a lost child—overwhelmed, disbelieving. Clara
recognized that expression of loss and the accompanying fury of being helpless to stop it.

“Nicholas, what is it?” she said carefully. “What is this place?”

“She's done it,” he whispered, “just like she said she would. I had hoped she wouldn't be able to, but . . .”

Clara touched his arm. “This
is
Cane, isn't it? Your home?”

“It's Cane, but it isn't my home, not anymore.” His voice was bleak, as though something essential had been drained from him. “It's theirs. Cane now belongs to the faeries.”

A
t the despair on Nicholas's face, Clara felt the strength bleed from her. A land crawling with ravenous machines. A land ruled by the
faeries
. The rescue of her father seemed increasingly impossible.

“Are you sure?” she prodded. “Maybe you're wrong.”

Nicholas flung out his hand at the city. “You saw the mechaniks, Clara. You know what they can do. This is what we fought against for generations, and now it's happened. I know what I see, and I know what it means.”

Clara could see panic unfolding across him, the same that she felt in her own heart. She drew on something deep and Godfather-bred within her, and focused her thoughts.

“Well, we can't stay here,” she said. “If we stay, we'll be seen.”

“And where shall we go? In
there
?” He glared at the city.

“Yes, in there. We can find answers, food, and shelter.”

“Clara, I don't know what that city is! Do you understand that?” He grabbed her shoulders, his eyes bright with grief. “I don't know what awaits us in there. The home I knew is gone now.”

“You don't know that. There's bound to be something familiar to you here, something that can help us.” She forced a smile she did not feel and clasped his arms; with their bodies touching, she felt steadier. “Are all princes this fatalistic?”

After a moment his scowl broke. He wiped his face with his sleeve. “You always did know how to make me laugh,” he said ruefully, “even though no one could hear it.”

What a painful thing to imagine, his lonely, trapped laughter. “Come. We've got to keep moving.”

They crept toward the city through a narrow field dotted with choked undergrowth and crude roadways, down which faery soldiers patrolled and moved equipment to and from the wall. Gnarled trees shone as though carved from black glass, and their branches seemed to murmur unknowable words. The storming skies emanated a strange half-light; it was still day—or at least Clara thought so—but it did not look it.

They crossed the canal at the city's edge by way of an ugly iron bridge stained with unidentifiable congealed . . .
remains
, Clara guessed. She could not avoid stepping in them, and her bile rose at each squelch of her boots. On the other side of the bridge, Nicholas stopped. His body sagged as if burdened with fresh weight. When Clara followed his gaze, her first shameful thought was not of the pitiful sight before her but of herself:
We cannot linger here. We cannot draw their attention.

The people here, in the slums on the other side of the canal, had sunken cheeks and eyes either sharp with desperation or horribly vacant. Clara was not sure which disturbed her more. Their postures were hunched, their strides halting and broken. Ugly bruises clouded their skin, green and blue and mottled black to match the sky.

Most notably, they were not faeries; they were
human
.

Nicholas drew his coat tighter around his body.

“Don't look at them,” Clara murmured, afraid.

He understood, and trudged along, staring at his feet. She ducked her head and did the same. Even half-frozen and wounded, they were less . . .
stretched
than these people, not so hollow and spider-thin. These people were wraithlike, somehow both brittle and unnaturally languid, poking at their fires listlessly, gnawing on hard strings of gray meat.

One of them, a man with sickly copper skin that might have once been
beautiful, lay on a bed of rags, hair piled on his head in discolored hunks. As he pressed a grimy canister to his arm, his eyes met Clara's. A silver needle entered his flesh; he closed his eyes and let out a moan.

Beneath his skin something shot through his arm, glowing.

When the man opened his eyes, they swam with unnatural color. A wan light filled his face. He smiled, wet his lips.

“Nicholas,” Clara whispered.

He looked revolted. “I saw.”

A young woman approached them. Oil and paint smeared her skin; charcoal smudged her eyes in messy streaks.

“A silver for a tumble, mister?” she said, sidling up to Nicholas. Her hands, too frail and thin for such a young person, clutched his coat desperately. Her eyes were red; misery pinched her face. “Or you?” She turned to Clara. “You like girls? I'm good with girls. The faeries say I'm good with girls. Just been onstage at the outer houses, but you've still got to be good enough, or they won't let you in. What do you think? Five coppers? Four? It's a steal.”

Even as Clara shrank away from this woman, she couldn't help but ask: “What's happened to you?”

The woman glared at Clara, indignant, and drew herself up. “You ain't no treat yourself, love.”

Gently Nicholas pried the woman's hands from his coat. “I'm sorry, but I don't have anything to give you. Why don't you go on home?”

He smiled at her, but the woman spat at his feet. A man covered with sores whistled at her from a nearby hut, and her eyes lit up with frenzied relief. She left them there, but her voice, cooing vile suggestions at the man, followed Clara into the city.

It was chaos there.

Apartments atop apartments, shops over shops—in too-tall, too-narrow rows, teetering beneath the weight of disproportion. A vast marketplace, churning with hawkers and peddlers, sprawled across twisting roadways striped with oil. Streetcars embellished with iron
scrollwork spewed black smoke, and clusters of railways stretched high above like the bars of an enormous cage. Throughout, a grid of canals in garish colors stank of chemicals. Every door, every rooftop and shop cart, seemed merely a shell for what lay underneath—wires, gears, rods, pistons, as though machinery were the city's blood and bone, holding everything together. They tumbled out of the sides of buildings, lined the cobbled walks, blinked blue lights from the throats of disfigured animals pulled from the water by blank-eyed fishermen. Large, flat pieces of glass hung everywhere—affixed to buildings, hanging from slender iron posts, connected to the city's mechanical underbelly with thick clusters of wires. Phosphorescent liquid bubbled and flowed across the glass surfaces smoothly, forming images, broadcasting sound. Clara tried not to gape. How could such a thing possibly be constructed?

Throngs of people pressed close to her and Nicholas, and shouldered brutishly past. Everything stank—of sweat, decay, and something sweetly chemical. Clara tried not to gag on the smell, on the nearness of countless bodies. Fingers slithered past her, shoulders knocked against her, eyes roved over her body, her clothes, her face. Some of them leered; some merely appraised her.

An alarming thought came to her, and she glanced at Nicholas. His face was open, shattered, as though he had completely forgotten the possibility of danger. Clara sympathized: if he was telling the truth about this place having once been his home, she supposed the shock of seeing something that should have been familiar so thoroughly turned on its head was a horrible one.

If
he was telling the truth.

“Nicholas?” She hooked her arm through his, pulled him close for privacy. A necessary thing, but even now, in this awful moment, she felt suddenly bashful. “You said you were a prince, before. Will you be recognized?”

Nicholas seemed to shake himself. “Drosselmeyer had a theory,” he said under his breath. “Others did too. Magic folk and scholars. That the
passage of time in Cane differs from the passage of time Beyond.”

“Beyond?”

“Your world.” He smiled faintly. “As mythical to us as Cane would be to you, I think. Most people don't believe in it. Stories you tell your children.”

Clara stopped, gutted by a sudden dreadful thought. A muttering man swathed in waste-crusted clothes ran into them and began cursing at the top of his lungs, but Clara hardly noticed. She pulled Nicholas out of the way, in front of a lopsided building where a row of squashed stalls seemed to denote the site of a marketplace. At one of the stalls, a young boy held out a bowl, into which an old woman spooned brown slop. A surge of hunger nearly made Clara stumble, but first she had to ask:

“Do you mean to tell me that we've been here not even a day,” she whispered, “but more time than that could have passed back in New York?”

“I don't know. They're only theories, I told you.” Nicholas watched the old woman's stall from beneath his hair. “But I can tell you this: when I left, there were few in Cane who would not know my face, as often as I traveled during the war. And no one has recognized me today, not even that woman in the slums.”

Clara struggled for calm. “So that could mean that more time has passed here than has in New—in Beyond. Maybe
much
more time. Surely at least some people would know their prince even after . . . how many years away?”

“Eighteen. And you're right, unless everyone alive during my reign is dead.” He let out a soft, broken laugh. His eyes shone with an anguish Clara understood well. Loss, horrible loss. Pain and anger, and the world being pulled out from beneath one's feet.

If he was pretending, she decided, he was an astonishing actor. She recognized the look of grief; at home she had worn it like a second skin. But before she could respond, a man with one eye and oil-matted hair shoved them apart.

“Either you're a payin' customer,” he said, his voice low and rattling, “or you get out of the way.”

Behind him the old woman serving slop glared at them; an old scar, lumpy as though from a wound poorly stitched, stretched across her cheek.

Nicholas looked bored, but Clara saw his hand drift toward his sword. “How much?” he said, disinterested.

“Five coppers. Each.”

Clara pulled the jewels from her ears. “Here. What about these?” She tried to follow Nicholas's lead and imitate the man's slurred accent. “Worth more than five coppers, I'll bet.”

The one-eyed man pocketed the earrings with a grunt and nodded at the old woman. She returned to her ladling with a frown, and then the one-eyed man was thrusting at them two bowls of steaming, porridge-colored . . . “soup” seemed too generous a word.

“Eat fast and then move on.” The one-eyed man leaned closer, his breath putrid. “And don't try to steal those bowls, neither, or you'll regret you was ever born.”

They began to eat, too hungry to respond to the man's threat, or to care that they had to eat with their hands—burning their fingers, dribbling slop that tasted vaguely of dirt onto their chins. As they slurped it down, the crowd in the marketplace shoved past them, an ever-moving tide of human misery dotted with faery splendor. Clara saw more soldiers, wealthy-looking faeries in fine clothes edged with grime, and even faery children—led by their parents, extravagantly costumed, their faces exquisitely indifferent as humans parted to make way for them.