Clockwork Angels: The Novel (27 page)

Then again, he never would have become who he was.
All is for the best.

The steamliner traveled one route after another, heading to different frontier towns. Owen experienced surprising climate changes, observed strange plants and animals, encountered odd customs, ate new foods. Though it went far beyond any wild adventure he had ever imagined, this was now his daily life. There was constant traveling, interrupted by occasional destinations.

He worked his way through the books in the steamliner’s library. Many of the volumes were printed with letter-symbols unlike any language he had ever seen, so he ignored those (at least until such time as he could learn other written languages).

On a high shelf, Owen discovered a ragged, well-thumbed book with a spine so weathered that he couldn’t read the letters. He took it down and opened the cover to the title page.
An Account of My Adventures, Travels, and Discoveries Across Albion, Atlantis, and Beyond.
The subject itself fascinated him, and he glanced down at the name of the author.

Hanneke Lakota.

His mother’s name!

For so many years in his wandering imagination, he had fancied her exploring the world, pretending that she had not died of a fever but had slipped away from humdrum Barrel Arbor to exotic countries, intriguing cultures, breathtaking sights. In his heart, though, he had always known the hard truth that she was really buried in the Barrel Arbor cemetery, that his father had given her a peaceful grave on a grassy hillside on the edge of town. Owen remembered, despite trying his best to forget, his mother lying covered in blankets, her hair matted with sweat, his father on his knees by the bedside while the boy, Owen, was hustled off to stay with neighbors. . . .

He turned the page, looked at the first paragraph of the book. “The best place to start an adventure is with a quiet, perfect life . . . and someone who realizes that it can’t possibly be enough. To most people, a quiet village might be a fine place to live, but I wanted to see the world, all of it. And so I did.”

His eyes went wide, his vision blurred with tears. He took the volume to Pangloss, who stood at the control station, checking the pressure gauges of the coldfire engine. “Commodore . . . this book.”

The bearded man looked at him, recognized the volume. “Ah yes, a remarkable story. She was quite an explorer, renowned, influential—and not just in her own world. Her works have trickled elsewhere, even to here, stories to inspire the imagination.”

“This is my mother’s name!”

“Is that so? And in her world—” He tapped the worn cover of the book. “She went out and followed her imagination. In this world, your mother stayed in a small village, got married, had a son. Now you are doing the exploring . . . while in other worlds, there are undoubtedly other Owen Hardys who never found the nerve to leave home.”

Owen took the book back and curled up in a corner, poring over the words, page after page, all the way to the end of the story. Then he started over again from the beginning.

As they reached Endoline, the most isolated mining town deep in the mountains, beyond which lay only uncharted wilderness, the steamliner alighted on the rails and drew to a stop in the austere station. On each such run, they would spend the night before turning around with a full cargo load and heading back to Poseidon City. The rails ended here, and the airship portion of the steamliner could travel only a certain distance past the pivot. Beyond Endoline, travel and commerce stopped, and no one showed any inclination to extend the route.

The nearby cliffs held a rich vein of redfire opals, sparkling ruby-colored power sources that burned hot and smelled like iron.

A tragic conflagration in the tunnels had recently killed ten miners, causing a shutdown of the works (and driving up the price of redfire opals across Atlantis). Now, the work had begun again, and Endoline had a load to sell Commodore Pangloss in exchange for much-needed supplies.

Thanks to their isolation, the people had to be self-sufficient for the most part. They piped in water from streams and used their own redfire opals to power the town. Hunters combed the mountains and returned with plentiful game; each household maintained a terraced garden of vegetables and herbs. The people had money, but little opportunity to spend it on comforts and desirable goods. When the steamliner pulled into the station for unloading, the villagers gleaned every possible useful item from the cargo cars; alas, because their town was the end of the line, the crates had already been picked over.

Owen ate an over-salted dinner with Pangloss in the town’s tavern; each of them enjoyed a thick, gamey antelope steak and tasted a potent distilled local liquor that made Owen dizzy after only a single glass. The Commodore imbibed sparingly, having sampled the liquor before.

At a nearby table, three redfire opal miners were playing a game with cards and chips. They sang aloud, joining one another in a chorus about the Seven Cities of Gold, which piqued Owen’s interest. It was the same song Cabeza de Vaca had sung in the alley in Poseidon.

In recent days, Owen had been thinking a great deal about the Seven Cities because in the travels of his other-mother,
she
had come upon the sparkling metropolis of golden buildings, an energetic civilization. The people there had welcomed her as an ambassador, feted her with amazing performances and lavish feasts; she had visited each of the Seven Cities on top of a vast mesa and stayed there for months before continuing her travels.

The legends in the storybook from his real mother had always fascinated him, and now the descriptions in the travelogue sparked his desire to see them even more.

When the song finished, he called over to their table. “Do you know where to find the Cíbola—Seven Cities? Have you ever been there?”

The men just laughed. “No one goes out there. The Seven Cities are a dream, not for any man to find.”

Owen puffed up his chest. “And what if I’m not just any man?” His answer brought another round of raucous laughter, and he added, “I don’t believe in the impossible. It doesn’t exist.”

Pangloss gave him a paternal smile. “The boy has been reading a lot. He stokes his imagination as much as he stokes the big wheels of the locomotive.”

The people of Endoline obviously knew Pangloss well. One of the men joked, “You and your books, Commodore!”

Owen felt his thoughts swirl, possibly because of the surprisingly intoxicating drink. He lifted his chin. “We’ve heard of Cíbola from as far away as Albion. If there are so many stories, the Seven Cities must exist—or at least they used to.”

“Oh, they’re out there, lad,” said one of the miners, “lost in the Redrock Desert beyond the mountains. People have searched for them, but no one ever returns.”

“Maybe because it’s a utopia and nobody wants to leave,” Owen said.

Warming himself by the glowing redfire opal blaze in the hearth, a lean and rangy man with a wispy beard set his pipe aside. “Sometimes I go hunting far to the west of the mines, and I see things out there—petroglyphs, giant carvings in the slickrock, arches and hoodoos that must have been created by powerful alchemy. It’s a sight that could drive a normal person mad.”

Owen replied, echoing his previous statement but not intending to be funny, “And who’s to say I’m a
normal
person?”

Commodore Pangloss took him by the arm. “You’ve had enough to drink, Mr. Hardy, and enough conversation. Let’s get a good night’s sleep before we head back down the line at dawn.”

Owen let himself be led with an unsettling wobbly gait back to the inn. But his sleep was restless.

Next morning, the steamliner departed from Endoline, and Owen traveled again, day by day, on the route back to Poseidon. He became increasingly fixated on thoughts of finding the Seven Cities. He reread his other-mother’s adventures among the people in the legendary golden cities, tasted the food in her descriptions, heard the music she evoked with her words. The longing to see it for himself became like a sliver in his skin that he could not pluck out.

As a young man in Barrel Arbor, he had dreamed of Crown City and the Clockwork Angels, Poseidon, Atlantis, and the Seven Cities of Gold. The stories had fired his imagination.

But over the course of his adventures, those stories had been tarnished by reality. The vibrant chronotype images had taken his young, optimistic mind to imaginary lands, but the truth he saw with his own eyes was very different. He had begun to lose hope.

Crown City had not been what he expected. And the Angels, for all their synchronized beauty and grace, had been unsettling. The Watchmaker’s city was not perfect, with or without the Anarchist, and Owen did not feel that the joy and pain he received were what he deserved. The carnies had been a bright spot that darkened to disappointment; what he’d thought was true love had turned out to be an illusion.

His string of broken dreams was like a sequence of derailed steamliner cars strewn across the landscape. Fleeing Crown City in disgrace, he had turned his optimistic sights instead to fabled Poseidon City, which was also quite different from what he had anticipated, proved a devastating disappointment. His treasure chest of hopes and visions was nearly empty. None of the other stories had measured up to his optimistic expectations.

But was it possible that
all
those stories were untrue? He refused to believe it. He now had read his other-mother’s descriptions. Surely at least one of the beautiful legends was based in fact.

Here in Atlantis, his life was no longer part of the Watchmaker’s intricate clockwork society, nor was he trapped on a rigid rail, like the steamliners, going only to specified destinations back and forth, never straying beyond the pivot distance. He could follow his dreams now. He could see for himself.

Finding the Seven Cities was his last hope of rekindling the sense of wonder he had as a child. Cíbola had to be real.

As the steamliner traveled its routes, Owen scoured the Commodore’s library for any other records of the Seven Cities, but found only offhand and contradictory references. Pangloss watched his fascination become an obsession, and he indulged Owen.

Three weeks later, after the steamliner had run its course to all the destinations and then back into the mountains to far-flung Endoline, Owen was eager to go back to the tavern.

Feeling wistful but determined, he spoke to the Commodore as the airships coasted in on the rails, braking toward the mining town. “Sir, I’ve appreciated my time with you more than I can say. But now that we’re here, I . . . there’s something I have to do. I’m going to find the Seven Cities.”

Pangloss wiped his hands down his unruly beard, and answered with a grave nod. “I knew you’d make that decision soon, Mr. Hardy. It is impossible to hide restlessness aboard a small steamliner car.”

Owen swallowed hard. “If I find the cities, I might not be coming back.”

“If you don’t find them, you might not be coming back either. But you know how to find me, if you do.”

The two men entered the tavern. Very little had changed there: the same miners were playing the same game, again singing their song about the Seven Cities. The rangy hunter was still by the glowing redfire opal hearth, and Owen approached him. “I’m going to the Seven Cities of Gold. What clues can you give me? Please, tell me what you’ve seen.”

The card players chuckled. The innkeeper scoffed goodnaturedly. “Heard that one before.”

But Commodore Pangloss nodded, and the tavern patrons realized Owen was serious.

“Head west and keep walking,” the hunter said. “After the mountains, you’ll enter the Redrock Desert, and your feet will take you where few people have ever been. Canyons and basins, towering mesas rising out of the desert like tree stumps. They say you’ll find paradise on top, if you can climb there.”

“Who says that?” Owen asked.

“
They
do.” The hunter took another deep puff of his pipe. “According to the legend, there is a lake between the sun and the moon, a sparkling white expanse just below a mesa. Cíbola is on top of that mesa. All seven cities.” He puffed on his pipe again. “But I wouldn’t go there.”

Commodore Pangloss had deep sadness etched on his face that even his huge beard couldn’t hide. “I won’t talk you out of it, Mr. Hardy.” He let out a long sigh. “I owe you wages—I’ll help you buy the equipment you need.”

Owen felt feverish with his desire to see and explore the place, but he hadn’t thought about the practical aspect. What supplies and equipment did a person need for such an expedition? He might have wandered off into the wilderness entirely unprepared. It would have been worse than trying to live on the streets of Poseidon, and he’d have no Guerrero to help him. With a chill, he imagined his desiccated corpse picked clean by vultures somewhere out in a forgotten wash, with no one even to stand over him and say a benediction that “All is for the best.”

The following day, Pangloss did not depart on schedule, but instead spent hours with Owen, helping him purchase packaged food, water containers, rope, a knife, packets of fire-starting pow der. “These supplies don’t cover half of what I owe you, Mr. Hardy. Would you like the rest now in coins?”