Clockwork Heart

Clockwork Heart

by Dru Pagliassotti

Copyright © 2013

E-Book Edition

Published by

EDGE Science Fiction and
Fantasy Publishing

An Imprint of

HADES PUBLICATIONS, INC.

CALGARY

Notice

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Dedication

To my family and friends,
and in memory of my mother, Skydancer.

Chapter One

Taya cupped and fanned her wings, slowing as the iron struts of a wireferry tower loomed before her. The massive construction blocked the gusting winds, and she sighed with relief as her thick boot soles hit the girder. Bending her knees to absorb the impact, she crouched and folded her arms, ducking into the safe harbor.

The wind in the wires sent vibrations thrumming through the metal under her feet, and the tower swayed. She locked her armature into tight-rest, tail feathers snapped up and wings tucked in. With a wriggle, she pulled her arms out of their struts and straps and looped a safety line from her harness around one of the narrow girders.

“Oh, that's better,” she groaned, rubbing her shoulders. She pulled off her flight goggles and wiped them against her sleeve. The glass was smeared with dead bugs and the inevitable greasy soot that collected whenever she flew past the city's refineries.

Usually, the trip up from Tertius was easy. Thermals from the smelting factories provided plenty of lift, but today the late autumn gusts of the
diispira
— the winds that blew over the Yeovil Range every year right before winter — made flight risky. For a few minutes, when one of the winds had stolen her thermal and sent her into a stall, Taya had flapped like a foundering duck. Her shoulder muscles were still twitching, and the sweat from her efforts was drying beneath her flight leathers.

How much longer until she was off-duty, anyway?

She slipped her goggles back on to protect her eyes from the wind and surveyed the mountainside beneath her. Terrace upon terrace of closely placed buildings descended into the dark haze of factory soot that perpetually mantled the lowest sector of the mountain. That was Tertius, the sector where the famulate caste labored in the manufactories to provide the metals and goods that maintained Ondinium. Tertius — where she'd been born and her sister was about to get married.

Thick stone walls ringed Ondinium Mountain, dividing the major sectors from each other: Primus, for the exalteds; Secundus, for the cardinals; and Tertius, for the plebeians. Gates pierced the walls at regular intervals, but each portal was guarded by stern-faced lictors whose job was to prevent the indiscriminate mixing of castes.

Only icarii like Taya and the occasional authorities who rode the suspended wireferries could pass freely from sector to sector. And even wireferry passengers were checked at waystations whenever they changed cars, especially at Primus.

Taya searched the soot-blackened towers that rose at regular intervals along the sector walls, looking for a clock.

Spotting one, she smiled. Another hour and she could go home and prepare for the wedding. With a little luck she could deliver the report from the College of Mathematics and linger long enough at Oporphyr Tower to avoid picking up another job. As long as the decatur didn't give her another message to carry, she'd get to the party in plenty of time.

The metal beneath her feet jolted and shuddered. Taya grabbed the strut next to her with one heavily gloved hand. Usually she loved flying, but today's winds were the worst she'd—

The girder jolted again, and the high-pitched shriek of straining metal cut across the whistling wind and humming cables. Taya jerked her head up, looking for the source of the noise.

There. One of the wireferry girders, suspended in midair several yards away from her, was bending under the weight of an approaching car. Gears ground and spun as the heavy wire cables slipped and the girder started to buckle.

Taya leaped to her feet, banging her head against a low strut. She winced, looking around. Didn't anyone else see the danger?

Yes — wireferry workers were racing up the tower ladders from a nearby station, but they were too far away to do the people in the car any good.

“Oh, Lady,” she groaned, unsnapping her safety hook and tucking the strap back into her harness. Even though the rational part of her mind was screaming warnings about the danger of flying next to a collapsing girder, of maneuvering around wires that could snap at any moment, she was already dredging up memories of old aerial rescue drills, calculating wind direction and target height, her best angle of attack and the load-bearing capacity of her ondium armature.

Heart pounding, Taya slid her arms back into her wings and crouched.

It had to be done. Her armature tugged her upward, its buoyant ondium straining against the weight of her compact body. Shifting to put her head into the wind, Taya threw herself into the air, her boots smacking the beam for extra thrust.

Metal girders shot past as she plunged through their deadly network. As soon as she was clear of the support structure, she threw her arms wide, snapping her metal wings to full extension.

Broad ondium feathers closed as she swept her arms downward, propelling herself toward the endangered ferry car. She kicked her tailset down and slid her ankles behind its bar. A gust of air tugged her and she rode it aloft, then swept her wings again as the gust veered off, broken by an obstruction current from the girders around her.

Metal shrieked again. Wires snapped and twanged.

Time was running out. Taya strained forward, flying up and over the ferry car to get a clearer grasp of the situation.

Two passengers clutched the car's leather-covered seats — an adult and a child. The adult was wearing robes and a mask. An exalted.

“Scrap!” Taya wheeled, searching for assistance. Engineers were scrambling over the breaking girder, but they still weren't in any position to help. A small group was stringing another support wire through the struts to keep the straining girder from crashing hundreds of feet to the street below, but that wouldn't save the passengers if the car cable snapped.

One person at a time
, she counseled herself. The wind was suddenly icy on her face as sweat trickled down from her hairline.
Just concentrate on rescuing one person at a time.

She circled back to the ferry and began to brake, her tailset down and her wings cupped. She kicked her feet free.

Momentum and uneven winds sent her crashing into the side of the car. Taya's knees buckled against her chest and she gasped, twisting one hand out of its wingstruts to grab the service handle on the side of the car.

An arm reached through the window and caught the harness straps along her shoulder. Taya looked up. The exalted stared at her, her dark eyes wide but her ring-covered hand gripping the leather harness like iron.

Taya breathlessly nodded her thanks, taking a tighter grip on the door handles. The woman released her and Taya yanked the ferry door open, grabbing the sides of the doorframe. Her ondium wings scraped against the sides of the ferry car and she flinched.

“Take Ariq,” the lady said, her voice shaking. She swept up the child at her side. “Save him.”

Ariq screamed, staring at Taya's goggle-masked face, and tried to kick away. He couldn't have been any older than four, his round face still free of castemarks.

“I've got him.” Taya braced the edges of her feet against the doorframe to steady herself as she took the boy from his mother. Ignoring the child's shrieks, she pressed him against her stomach and snapped safety cords between his legs and under his arms. She'd done it before in practice drills, but a squirming child was harder to strap in than a stuffed dummy. “I'll be back as soon as I can.”

The exalted nodded. Her castemarks, sweeping blue waves tattooed across each cheek, stood out sharply against her pallor. She'd let her ivory mask fall to the floor, and she'd stripped off her jeweled public robe to free her arms.

Taya finished securing the terrified boy to her harness and slid her arm back into its wing.

The car jolted again, dropping a few more feet as the girder bent and the cables slipped. The woman gasped and Taya threw herself backward, free of the doorway.

For one nauseating moment she was in free fall, and then she twisted around, spreading her wings. They checked her descent with a violent jolt, ondium and air currents fighting gravity. The boy screamed, one long howl of terror.

The engineers at Cardinal Station Six were the closest. Taya flapped without any regard for her dignity, concerned only with maximizing speed and lift as she compensated for the unfamiliar and frantically shifting weight against her midsection. The stubby metalwork dock several yards beneath the breaking girder was her target.

Several workers saw her coming and stretched out their hands. She swooped down, braked, and let them grab her by her legs and harness to haul her in. Holding her wings over her head, she stood as motionless as possible as the workers steadied her with brusque efficiency. Ariq howled again as they stripped away the straps and buckles that held him, roughly tucking them back into her harness.

“There's another one up there!” a man shouted, as the tower shuddered. Everyone looked up fearfully, but the gears and girder were still holding. Barely.

“I know.” Taya waited just long enough to make sure Ariq was in safe hands, then turned and kicked off from the work dock as engineers and repairmen ducked beneath her sweeping wings.

Another icarus had spotted the danger and was circling the threatened car, seeking a safe approach. Taya swept up, foundered under an unexpected crosswind, then caught herself. The other flier saw her and rocked his wings left and right.

Relieved to have backup, Taya angled toward the ferry.

The exalted was standing in the doorframe, staring up at the bending girder with her hands clamped over her mouth. Taya swept her wings backward and slammed into the car.

“Grab me!” she shouted as the car lurched. The woman reached out — and then, with a horrifying screech, the tower buckled and the ferry plummeted.

Taya's foot slipped from the car's doorframe and she tumbled backward, feeling the exalted's arms tighten around her neck as they dropped. Both of them screamed. Taya instinctively spread her wings to catch as much air as possible, but the edge of the falling car clipped her flight primaries and sent her into a spin.

Wires!
Taya thought with alarm, beating both wings in a desperate attempt to get lift. If a loose wire hit them, it would slice them in half. If a girder hit them, it would smash them to a pulp.

Her sister would never forgive her if she died hours before the wedding.

But the plummet continued. Her armature hadn't been built to carry another adult. Taya had hoped to have enough time to go into a controlled glide, but—

Her wings caught an updraft and their descent slowed, almost imperceptibly. The woman clutching her shoulders moaned, the only sound she'd made since that first scream.

Taya wanted to tilt, but the woman's excess weight was dragging her down vertically, and all she could do was try to control their fall by flapping as hard as she could. The exalted's fingers dug between her shoulder straps and her flight suit. Her legs were wrapped around Taya's waist, and her face was pressed against Taya's neck.

Somewhere metal crashed against metal, and people shouted, but Taya couldn't look up to see what had happened. She felt a drag on her wing— clipping the side of the car must have damaged one of her feathers.

“Taya!” The shout was barely audible over the wind in her ears. The other icarus swept past, wings locked. A locked glide was a dangerous maneuver at the best of times, especially so close to the wireferry girders, but it was the only way he could free an arm to yank loose one of his safety lines. “Grab on!”

“Exalted! Listen!” Taya shouted into the woman's ear. “There's a safety line dropping toward us. You have to hook it to my harness!”

The woman's arms tightened around her, and Taya could feel the exalted's heart hammering. But then, with the same desperate courage she'd shown in the ferry car, the lady looked up.

“I can't!”

Taya swept her arms down again, straining to keep them from entering free fall.

“Grab the line or we're both dead!”

The line swung past. The exalted took a halfhearted pass at it, but the line slipped through her fingers. Taya shuddered as she nearly missed a beat.

The icarus above them made a tight circle. The line swung past again. This time the exalted caught it, then clutched Taya's shoulders. Taya felt the safety line's clasp slide through the rings in her back harness.

“It's done,” the woman gasped.

Their fall slowed as the icarus above them shared their weight. They were safe.

A crowd had gathered on the street to watch the drama unfolding hundreds of feet above their heads. Arms reached up to grab her and her passenger, and Taya had to shout at them to back off so she'd have enough space to land. For a second she hovered, backbeating. The exalted slid off and collapsed to the ground, shaking.

Then Taya's boots hit the street and she staggered, taking a few steps forward. She barely remembered to yank her arms free and unfasten the safety line before she, too, sank into a crouch, wrapping her arms around her shoulders and trembling with relief. Strangers surrounded her, touching her floating wings for luck and saying things to her that sounded like an incoherent rumble.

Lictors appeared, barking orders. Taya drew in a deep breath and pulled her goggles down around her neck. She turned and knelt next to the woman she'd saved.

“Are you all right, Exalted?”

The woman rolled over, her gold hair ornaments clinking against the cobblestones, and opened her eyes.

“Is Ariq safe?”

“I left him at the tower station.” Taya jerked her head upward. “He's all right. Just a little scared.”

“Thank you.” The woman closed her eyes again.

“Excuse me. Exalted.” A lictor stepped forward, his eyes averted, and held out a rough scarf. Taya took it from him.

“Your face, Exalted,” she said, draping the scarf over the woman's head. “It's bare.”

“Oh, Lady save us,” the woman snapped with disgust, then sat up, holding the scarf in place. Her hands were unsteady, but she wrapped the scarf around her face, leaving only her eyes visible.