Clockwork Princess (42 page)

He moved toward the stables mechanically, his mind racing over the possibilities. A demon attack? Or had he stumbled into the middle of something non-supernatural, some feud between townsfolk, or God only knew what? No one seemed to be looking for him in particular, that much was clear.

He could hear Balios’s anxious whickering as he let himself into the stable. It appeared undisturbed, from the plaster ceiling to the cobbled floor crisscrossed with drainage ditches. No other horses were stabled there that night, which was lucky, for the moment he opened the stall door, Balios plunged forward, nearly knocking Will over. Will was only just able to dart out of the way as the horse hurtled past him and out the door.

“Balios!”
Will swore and took off after his horse, pounding around the side of the inn and into the main road of the town.

He stopped dead. The street was in chaos. Bodies lay crumpled, discarded at the side of the road like so much rubbish. Homes stood with their doors ripped open, windows smashed in. People were running in and out of the shadows haphazardly, screaming and calling for one another. Several of the houses were burning. As Will stared in horror, he saw a family spill from the door of a burning house, the father in a nightshirt, coughing and choking, a woman behind him holding the hand of a small girl.

They had barely staggered into the street when shapes rose up out of the shadows. Moonlight sparked off metal.

Automatons.

They moved fluidly, without faltering or jerkiness. They wore clothes—a motley assortment of military uniforms, some recognizable to Will and some not. But their faces were bare metal, as were their hands, which gripped long-bladed swords. There were three of them; one, in a torn red army tunic, moved ahead, laughing—
laughing?
—as the father of the family tried to push his wife and daughter behind him, stumbling over the bloody cobblestones of the road.

It was all over in moments, too fast even for Will to move. Blades flashed, and three more bodies joined the heaps in the streets.

“That’s it,” said the automaton in the ragged tunic. “Burn their houses and smoke them out like rats. Kill them when they run—” It raised its head, and seemed to see Will. Even across the space that separated them, Will felt the force of that gaze.

Will raised his seraph blade.
“Nakir.”

The shimmer of the blade blazed up, illuminating the street, a beam of white light amid the red of flames. Through blood and fire Will saw the automaton in the red tunic stride toward him. A longsword was gripped in its left hand. The hand was metal, jointed, articulate; it curved around the hilt of the blade like a human hand.

“Nephilim,” the creature said, stopping a mere foot from Will. “We did not expect your kind here.”

“Clearly,” Will said. He took a step forward and rammed the seraph blade into the automaton’s chest.

There was a faint sizzling sound, as of bacon frying in a pan. As the automaton gazed down in bemusement, Nakir crumbled away to ash, leaving Will’s hand clutched around a vanished hilt.

The automaton chuckled, raising its gaze to Will. Its eyes crackled with life and intelligence, and Will knew with a sinking in his heart that he was looking at something he had never seen before—not just a creature that could turn a seraph blade to ash but a kind of machine that had will and cleverness and strategy enough to burn a village to the ground in order to murder the inhabitants as they fled.

“And now you see,” said the demon, for that was what it was, standing before him. “Nephilim, all these years you have driven us from this world with your runed blades. Now we have bodies that your weapons will not work on, and this world
will be ours
.”

Will sucked in his breath as the demon raised the longsword. He took a step back— The blade swung over and down— He ducked away, just as something hurtled alongside him in the road, something huge and black that reared and kicked and knocked the automaton aside.

Balios.

Will reached up, blindly scrabbling for his horse’s mane. The demon sprang up from the mud and leaped for him, blade flashing, just as Balios bolted forward, Will swinging himself up and over onto the horse’s back. They plunged down the cobblestone street together, Will crouched down low on Balios, the wind tearing through his hair and drying the wetness on his face—whether it was blood or tears, he didn’t know.

Tessa sat on the floor of her room in Mortmain’s stronghold, staring numbly into the fire.

The flames played over her hands, the blue dress she wore. Both were stained with blood. She did not know how it had happened; the skin at her wrist was ragged, and she had some memory of an automaton seizing her there, tearing her skin with its sharp metal fingers as she tried to break away.

She could not rid her mind of the images that dominated it—the memories of the destruction of the village in the valley. She had been taken there blindfolded, carried by automatons, before being unceremoniously dumped onto an outcropping of gray rock with a view directly down into the town.

“Watch,” Mortmain had said, not looking at her, only gloating. “Watch, Miss Gray, and then speak to me of redemption.”

Tessa had stood prisoned, an automaton holding her from behind, a hand over her mouth, Mortmain murmuring softly under his breath the things he would do to her if she dared to look away from the village. She had watched helplessly as the automatons had marched into the town, cutting down innocent men and women in the streets. The moon had risen tinged red as the clockwork army had methodically set fire to house after house, slaughtering the families as they poured forth in confusion and terror.

And Mortmain had laughed.

“You see now,” he had said. “These creatures, these creations, they are capable of thought and reason and strategy. Like humans. And yet they are indestructible. Look, there, at that fool with the rifle.”

Tessa had not wanted to look, but she had had no choice. She had watched, dry-eyed and grim, as a distant figure had raised a rifle to defend himself. The blasts had knocked some of the automatons back but had not disabled them. They had kept coming at him, knocking his rifle from his hand, pushing him down into the street.

And then they had torn him apart.

“Demons,” Mortmain had murmured. “They are savage and they love to destroy.”

“Please,” Tessa had choked. “Please, no more, no more. I shall do whatever you desire, but please, spare the village.”

Mortmain had chuckled dryly. “Clockwork creatures have no hearts, Miss Gray,” he’d said. “They do not have mercy, any more than fire or water do. You might as well beg a flood or a forest fire to cease its destruction.”

“I am not begging them,” she’d said. From the corner of her eye, she’d thought she’d seen a black horse pounding through the streets of the village, a rider on its back. Someone escaping the carnage, she’d prayed. “I am begging
you
.”

He’d turned his cold eyes on her, and they’d been as empty as the sky. “There is no mercy in my heart either. You appealed, tiresomely, to my better self earlier. I brought you here to show you the futility of such action. I have no better self to appeal to; it was burned away years ago.”

“But I have done what you asked,” she’d said desperately. “There is no need for this, not for me—”

“It is not for you,” he’d said, flicking his gaze away from her. “The automatons had to be tested before they were sent into battle. That is simple science. They have intelligence now. Strategy. Nothing can stand before them.”

“They will turn on you, then.”

“They will not. Their lives are linked to mine. If I die, so are they destroyed. They must protect me to endure.” His look had been cold and faraway. “Enough. I brought you here to show you that I am what I am, and you will accept it. Your clockwork angel protects your life, but the lives of other innocents are in my hands—in
your
hands. Do not test me, and there will not be a second such village. I wish to hear no more tiresome protests.”

Your clockwork angel protects your life
. She put her hand on it now, feeling the familiar ticking beneath her fingers. She closed her eyes, but terrible images lived behind her eyelids. She saw in her mind the Nephilim driven before the automatons as the villagers had been, Jem torn apart by clockwork monsters, Will stabbed through with metal blades, Henry and Charlotte burning …

Her hand tightened savagely around the angel, and she tore it from her throat, casting it to the uneven rock floor just as a log fell in the fire, sending up a spitting column of red sparks. In their illumination she saw the palm of her left hand, saw the faint scar of the burn she had given herself the day she had told Will she was engaged to Jem.

As it had then, her hand went to the fireplace poker. She lifted it, feeling its weight in her hand. The fire had climbed higher. She saw the world through a golden haze as she raised the poker and brought it down on the clockwork angel.

Iron though the poker was, it burst into metallic powder, a cloud of shining filaments that sifted to the floor, dusting the surface of the clockwork angel, which lay, untouched and undamaged, on the ground before her knees.

And then the angel began to shift and change. Its wings trembled, and its closed eyelids opened on bits of whitish quartz. From them poured thin beams of whitish light. Like in paintings of the star over Bethlehem, the light rose and rose, radiating spikes of light. Slowly it began to coalesce into a shape—the form of an angel.

It was a shimmering blur of light so bright, it was difficult to look at directly. Tessa could see, through the light, the faint outline of something like a man. She could see eyes that were without iris or pupil—inset bits of crystal that gleamed in the firelight. The angel’s wings were broad, spreading out from its shoulders, each feather tipped with gleaming metal. Its hands were folded over the hilt of a graceful sword.

Its blank shining eyes rested on her.
Why do you try to destroy me?
Its voice was sweet, echoing in her mind like music.
I protect you
.

She thought of Jem suddenly, propped on his bed of pillows, his face pale and gleaming.
There is more to life than living
. “It is not you I seek to destroy, but myself.”

But why would you do that? Life is a gift
.

“I seek to do right,” she said. “In keeping me alive you are allowing great evil to exist.”

Evil
. The musical voice was thoughtful.
I have been so long in my clockwork prison that I have forgotten good and evil
.

“Clockwork prison?” Tessa whispered. “But how can an angel be prisoned?”

It was John Thaddeus Shade who imprisoned me. He caught my soul inside a spell and trapped it within this mechanical body
.

“Like the Pyxis,” Tessa said. “Only entrapping an angel instead of a demon.”

I am an angel of the divine
, said the angel, hovering before her.
I am brother to the Sijil, Kurabi, and the Zurah, the Fravashis and Dakinis
.

“And—is this your true form? Is this what you look like?”

You see here only a fraction of what I am. In my true form I am deadly glory. Mine was the freedom of Heaven, before I was trapped and bound to you
.

“I am sorry,” she whispered.

You are not the one to blame. You did not imprison me. Our spirits are bound, it is true, but even as I protected you in the womb, I knew you were blameless
.

“My guardian angel.”

Few can claim a single angel who guards them. But you can
.

“I don’t want to claim you,” Tessa said. “I want to die on my own terms, not be forced to live on Mortmain’s.”

I cannot let you die
. The angel’s voice was full of grief. Tessa was reminded of Jem’s violin, playing out the music of his heart.
It is my mandate
.

Tessa raised her head. The firelight struck through the angel like sunlight through crystal, casting a radiance of color against the walls of the cave. This was no foul contraption; this was goodness, twisted and bent to Mortmain’s will, but in its nature divine. “When you were an angel,” she said, “what was your name?”

My name
, said the angel,
was Ithuriel
.

“Ithuriel,” Tessa whispered, and held out her hand to the angel, as if she could reach him, comfort him somehow. But her fingers met only empty air. The angel shimmered and faded, leaving behind only a glow, a starburst of light against the inside of her eyelids.

A wave of cold struck Tessa, and she jerked upright, her eyes flying open. She was half-lying on the cold stone floor in front of the nearly dead fire. The room was dark, barely lit by the reddish embers in the grate. The poker was where it had been before. Her hand flew to her throat—and found the clockwork angel there.

A dream
. Tessa’s heart fell. It had all been a dream. There was no angel to bathe her in its light. There was only this cold room, the encroaching darkness, and the clockwork angel steadily ticking down the minutes to the end of everything in the world.

Will stood atop Cadair Idris, the reins of his horse in his hand.

As he had ridden toward Dolgellau, he had seen the massive wall of Cadair Idris towering above the Mawddach estuary, and the breath had gone out of him in a gasp—he was here. He had climbed this mountain before, as a child, with his father, and those memories stayed with him as he left the Dinas Mawddwy road and pounded toward the mountain on the back of Balios, who seemed still to be fleeing the flames of the village they had left behind them. They had continued through a weedy tarn—the silvery sea could be seen in one direction, and the peak of Snowdon in the other—up to the Nant Cadair valley. The village of Dolgellau below, sparkling with occasional light, made a pretty picture, but Will was not admiring the view. The Night Vision rune he had given himself allowed him to track the footsteps of the clockwork creatures. There were enough of them that the ground was torn where they had walked down the mountain, and he followed with a pounding heart the path of ruination toward the peak of the mountain.