Clockwork Chaos (35 page)

Instantly the face split along the jaw line, gaining a demonic appearance as it exposed seven intertwined gears spinning like mad with the sound of giant insects feasting on flesh. She stared at it in shock and I watched two of the pillars, a section of ceiling, the floor behind her... more and more places began to iris open like the petals of deadly flowers, exposing blades and spikes, mallets and deadfalls. There was a gong that sounded extremely judgmental.

“Esmeralda?” I called, and then nothing more. I felt my system hiccup, then again harder. My hands snapped into fists with a musical tone. Hidden doors were nearly open, traps showing hungry teeth. She looked around, saw the coming doom, and then produced her toolkit from off her belt and flipped it out like a long brown tongue. The gong sounded twice.

She brandished a chisel from her kit as doom descended on all sides. The gong rang once as she pressed each gear, mumbling frantically. I desperately tried to shake my paralysis as the second gong sounded and she wedged the metal lever under a cog—seemingly at random. But the gear was still turning, traps on all sides still opening, somewhere in the wall there was a striker cocking back to signal the end of her life.

There was a shriek, and a toothed circle of metal cart-wheeled in the air. Without the drive gear, the rest of the cogs reversed course, giving up their kinetic energy as the traps slammed shut like nightmares faced with the morning. Esmeralda reached into the hollow left by the drive gear and pulled a lever, unlocking the front door and causing it to swing in with a long, squeaking sigh.

She turned, a witty quip forming on lips that twisted, and then parted in surprise. I spun on a brass heel but the club was already moving.

The wooden bat connected with my midsection, sending me sprawling. Inside me the Edison tubes skipped and scratched, recoding events as white splashes of panic and corrupting unrelated lines of memory. They reset to their proper alignment in time to record Esmeralda shout “NO!”

Three men were approaching Esmeralda. I recognized them as loiterers from the bar. I pulled myself to my feet. The one talking was the rat-faced man. He had his hands spread in mock helplessness, saying something in a calming tone, but my recorders did not note it. Next to him another roughian, whip thin with cruel eyes, was fondling his baseball bat, rubbing a splintered crack in the end with ill humor. I did not waste time with any more detail. Instead I captured every line of Esmeralda’s stricken face, her defensive posture, and the meaty hand of the largest of the thugs grabbing her by the arm.

All four of them jumped and turned as a hellish noise exploded from me. Her words, the tone, the voice tripped complex decision switches inside my head, pulling me forward faster and faster as augmented springs engaged internal flywheels and cogs geared up to provide strength and speed. I wasn’t just running, my inside was accelerating, faster and faster. Gears wailed like an army of swords creating a tunnel of wind that flapped my cape like a pair of wings, stirring dirt from around my feet and rippling the grass like a summer squall. The men just had time to turn, only time to turn, as I leapt. With a mind of its own, the sword sprang from its sheath.

The burly man who had trapped Esmeralda threw a meaty back-hand toward me, a clumsy attack devoid of much power until focused upon my sword. I placed the needle tip in the path of the blow, and blood blossomed messily as he impaled himself. The important thing, the only important thing, was that he let go of Esmeralda, but she was shouting and pointing behind me. The burly thug started to howl as the thin man came from behind, readying his bat for another swing. I kicked the burly thug in the knee, messily toppling him off of the porch.

The thin man drew far back with the hickory club, aiming for the back of my head as he had once before. He closed his eyes with the effort of putting every tendon behind the strike, but to me he might as well have been swimming in molasses. To him, I spun in a blur and his swing stopped midway, ringing off of a buckler that came from nowhere. He pushed off and swung at head height, but I had already ducked and then jumped back from him. Only then did he realize I had put my sword through the top of his left foot, and he started screaming. I smashed his nose with the buckler, sending him over the banister and out onto the lawn.

The rat-faced man retreated, hands empty and pleading, mouth working to no avail. I could not hear him talk, I could not hear him beg, all I could hear was the constant shriek of my gears turning at the speed of sound. He bounced off a pillar on the porch, but as he came off of it I had his shirt balled up in my hand, my right arm pulled back, clicking offset teeth in the gears until it could trip the spring and shoot forward with the force—

“LEO!NO!” Her final word was snatched by the doorway of the abandoned mansion and set free to echo through the rooms within. It was not overcome by the screeching of my body, because my body had stopped.

At her command, over gears had slipped from position, clockworks had reengaged spring limiters, and safety catches had turned themselves on. I held the talking thug upright against the pillar with my shield hand, and the bronze sword point had entered his mouth, the tip well past his ramshackle teeth but just barely pricking the top of his mouth.

“Let... let him go.” Esmeralda said.

My sword tried to disappear into my forearm but the last few inches stuck, but nonetheless I set him down gently. He immediately fell over and crabbed away, leaving a trail of urine behind as he joined his injured mates down on the overgrown front lawn. They stared at me as if I were the ghost of VanMeek.

“It would be best if I did not see you again.” I said. Reflexively, I tried to retract my sword again, but it was still stuck. The effect of the sound of metal on metal was immediate, however. The Burly thug, ruined arm cradled, and Rat-face, still dribbling a yellow tail, picked up the thin one, who had a hole through the top one foot, and beat a hasty retreat toward town.

Only then did I understand the concept of weary.

I wavered on my feet a bit as my body went from spring to spring and found no kinetic energy left in the store. I put a hand out and grabbed a pillar as my internal gyro stuttered for a moment. Instantly, Esmeralda was there. She hooked up the winding contraption to my chest and began working the mechanism fiercely. I felt new power flood through me and into my storage coils.

“Thank you.” I said.

She frowned, shook her head, frowned more deeply, and pedaled faster. I was unsure if I should pry, or simply let be, but the silence became a weight between us. The more it pressed upon her, the more she was determined to ignore it until finally she erupted, “You were going to kill him!”

“If necessary.” I barely had to calculate the answer, “Yes.”

“Why?”

“They were a danger to you.”

“But you can’t just go around killing people!”

I felt several Edison tubes grind in error as those words were recorded, “I do not go around killing people. We have met or passed dozens of people I have not tried to hurt or kill. I attacked those men because they were going to hurt you.”

“You don’t know that!”

“By the time I found out for certain it would be too late to stop them.”

“But they just wanted the treasure like everybody else in Ironton. They are poor, and hungry.”

I nodded, “You are poor. Soon you very well may be hungry. Would you attack someone in order to get food?”

But even though every point was calmly spoken, gently phrased, and logically sound, it only made her more and more angry. “You are not allowed to kill people, Leo. Promise me you won’t kill people.”

I considered her words deeply, needles going crazy across drums in my head. I looked from the bent end of my bronze sword to the gleaming gears and metal tendons of my hand, to her exercise flushed face and pleading eyes.

“I can’t. Not if you are in danger.”

“It’s an order!”

I shook my head and whispered, “I cannot follow that order.”

“Clankers don’t say things like that. Clankers follow orders, Leo.” She stopped turning the windlass. Endless seconds were filled with nothing but the metallic clicks of my body. She hesitantly started up again, “You aren’t normal.”

I looked at my hand again, very certain she was correct. “Are you unhurt?”

“Yes? No? Whichever one means I am fine.” I nodded gratefully, feeling the increased potential inside my body indicate she was nearing full tension on my springworks, “You smell like burnt oil.”

I shrugged. “I probably burnt most of it off.”

She tensioned the last little bit of torque into my storage springs and pulled the windlass away. She took a small bottle of oil from her wrapped belt tool kit and sprayed it inside my body. “Your sword is bent.”

I considered the dangerous, deformed hunk of metal. then I offered the arm to her, “You had better take it off, then.”

She took up her tools once more and attacked the blade until it was straight enough to slide home smoothly. I looked from it, to her.

“Thank you for saving me, Leo.” she said.

“You are very welcome, Esmeralda.” I replied.

Then we stood together and entered LøveSlottet.

Esmeralda noticed there was no knob on this side of the door and sat her pack to block the door as we walked inside. It was a wise idea, for a hidden switch in the floor would have had the thing swing shut. We congratulated ourselves on our cleverness, but it was short lived, pride sucked out of us under the weight of forgotten majesty.

LøveSlottet was built of huge hunks of stone, with lions peering from every corner and flourish. The grand entryway was just as old man VanMeek had left it, if he had left it as a spider sanctuary. Thick, dusty webs hung from the ceiling in curtains, and the once golden yellow rugs were black with mold and rot. The fireplace could have once roasted a side of cow, if the iron grid work had not been reduced to red slag by years of incoming rain. Dark passageways delved more deeply into the grand home, and rickety staircases flew from the floor like a broken winged bird up to dangerous looking balconies. The chandelier, a time-frosted affair of crystal and glass, was barely holding onto the ceiling by its fingertips. But what caught both of us flat footed was the-

Esmeralda gasped, “Leo, it’s—”

“Yes.”

“—A clanker voicebox.”

“My voicebox.” I said, with no doubt. Way back in the shack I had seen the schematics for the complex resistance vibrator that I used to speak. This was the exact same design, but the size of a rain barrel.

“Is that the voicebox for LøveSlottet?” she asked, but it seemed to me she was actually asking the mansion itself.

I walked down into the main entry chamber and looked closely at the device, noting the two long poles extending from either side. I grasped one gingerly. “We can find out.”

Ignoring webs, dust, dirt, and the accusing eyes of a hundred lions, she came down and grasped the other pole on the far side. Lips pursed, she nodded and we pushed.

Half a decade of accumulated crud snapped free in an instant, and the poles began to turn on a ring situated around the voice box. Electric lights along the wall began to light feebly as we pushed, and water started to fill the hollow tube basin of the box itself.

Then it began to speak. The sound at first was blurred and unrecognizable, but then it started to reveal itself as the voice of an older man. He was a foreigner, with a thick accent, leaving little doubt it was VanMeek.

“You came here for my wealth, like all those that came before, but now I am dead, and I am free to do what I should have then.” Esmeralda stopped pushing and gasped, but the poles continued on inertia alone. I felt danger in the air, and safeties disengaged within my chest as the wind took me again. The voice continued, “My tears have become suffused with power and can kill with a single touch.”

Hatches opened in the base of the contraption and water flushed along the ruined floor in a great wave. Even without full comprehension I vaulted the pole in front of me and picked Esmeralda from off the floor. I heard a mechanical snap as a corded electric light was ejected from the wall and I tossed my friend up onto the stairs just as it touched the water.

I do not know what pain is. Perhaps I did not know what pain was. When my Edison tubes started working correctly there were a few minutes of memories so vile, so corrupted by the burst of electrocution I felt an immediate revulsion of the experience. I would do anything to avoid ever repeating it.

I heard the splash of water before my eyes cleared, but when they did she was there. Tears streamed down her face even as she sobbed with relief. “You’re alive! I was so afraid, Leo.”

I sat up and shook myself slightly as my gyroscope stuck, amazed that the water was already draining away through gates that opened in the floor. “Are you unhurt?”

“You saved my life.”

If I could have blinked, I would have. “I would never have lived without you.”

She took that in, her eyes going wide as she looked at me, and the voicebox, and back again. “Can you go on?”

My internal gears ground together as I remembered being electrocuted, but she was asking, pleading, “I can.”

Esmeralda stood and tried to brush the water borne mold from her overalls. “How did you know it was a trap?”

I repeated VanMeek, “My tears have become suffused with power and can kill with a single touch to their misery.”

She thought it through and nodded, “Can you do it again next time?”

I shrugged as I stood, my gears feeling a little less crisp and tempered than they used to be, “I don’t know.”

“You know what is at stake here.”

I nodded, “Your father.”

She tried to explode, “NO! It’s the whole town—”

But I laid a hand on her shoulder, and could sense the pure emotion pouring through her and making her tremble, “It’s your father, and that is understandable. It is human.”

She flipped her hair from her face and set her dripping jaw determinedly, “How do we do this?”

“You have to push. I’ll keep you safe.”