Mainspring (30 page)

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Authors: Jay Lake

BOOK: Mainspring
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Hethor sat silent into the evening. He was sad despite his promise to Arellya. He turned the golden tablet over and over in his hands while the correct people began to try out different versions of their story. They ate grubs and shoots foraged raw from the swamp and whistled and clicked far into the night.
“As God lives, so lives the world,” Hethor said to himself quietly. He had no stomach for the uncooked grubs,
but sidled off munching on some shoots to watch the starlit surf and think further on his golden tablet. What did it mean, then, that the Mainspring was running down?
Were the earthquakes the nightmares of God?
Or His palsies?
THE NEXT
day after breaking their way through more jungle and mud, they had to swim two miles of swamp, clinging to driftwood, to reach the sandy beach at the base of the lighthouse. By some miracle all the correct people made it, though Hethor expected crocodiles to leap out at any moment.
The lighthouse itself was of a cyclopean architecture Hethor had never seen outside of fanciful paintings, though it did resemble William of Ghent's jungle fortress. The building appeared to have been raised in solid rock, towering perhaps a hundred and fifty feet from the sand around its base, and hexagonal in cross-section. The base in turn simply plunged into the sand like the blade of a sheathed dagger, rather than revealing anything that might be considered a foundation. At the top each of the six faces branched out in a prong to support whatever mechanism generated the light. The whole structure was seamless, a deep uniform brown. There were no doors or windows that Hethor could locate.
“Is this how the huts of your village are made?” Arellya asked him. Unlike Hethor, she did not seem particularly awed by the lighthouse.
“Not at all,” said Hethor. “In fact, this challenges even my imagination.”
She smiled sweetly. “I find that unlikely.”
There must be a great race abiding here
, Hethor thought,
to make such things
. It was like reading Plato discussing Atlantis.
Past the lighthouse, the beach ran along another mile or so before reaching a breakwater and a city wall. Both structures were built of the same smooth, featureless
brown stone in a scale far outsized to the needs of ordinary men, let alone the little correct people.
Though the wall was vertical, shielding the bases of the towers behind it from view, the breakwater had angled sides. After some confusion a mission was dispatched to cut vines and sticks for a ladder. Once that work was done, Hethor and his band climbed the breakwater for their first real view of the city.
There were rings of walls, walls within walls partially visible because of the high arched gates that opened between them. Towers of construction very similar to the lighthouse scraped toward the sky. Some were topped with orreries or great wheels of brass in apparent imitation of God's design for the cosmos.
These towers within the walls had windows cut into them, though few and widely spaced. The effect was that of a race of giant children who had built with crude blocks, rather than the rational designs of man.
Only the harbor looked familiar. The sheltered water hosted a dozen sailing and steamships, and three airship masts. One of the airship masts was occupied, though by an airship of a design completely alien to Hethor's admittedly limited experience. Its gasbag was narrow and wide, almost like a manta ray's body. The hull beneath seemed shallow and wide to match. It stood peacefully at the mast, though Hethor imagined just from the shape that it would be quite fast. He also noted that unlike
Bassett,
it had no steering oars or stuns'l spars.
He was not here about ships. He was here to find Simeon Malgus. Hethor turned to Arellya and the other correct people, who were seated, staring across the breakwater at the harbor and the city.
“We have died,” one of the males said. “This is a place beyond the world.”
“I have never imagined a village so big,” said another.
“Or even stones of such a size,” added a third.
“This is as great as any of the cities of men where I come from, beyond the Wall,” Hethor said. The correct
people's language had no word for Northern Earth. “But still, these are just men. I mean to enter the city and search for the guide I lost before I met you.”
“You could spend a lifetime looking through such huts,” Arellya said.
“Well, yes.” Hethor didn't really want to consider that too carefully. “But I think it will be easier than that. I found him once before, atop the Wall, the previous time when I thought I had lost him.”
“And you claim that
he
is the guide?”
There was something dangerous about correct people logic, Hethor decided. “Let us be on our way, then.”
“This is truly the stone road,” said one of the correct people.
“Truly,” they all murmured.
IT WAS
not hard to enter the city—the walls, while high and steep, were unguarded. The gateways lacked even gates to shut. These people did not fear, Hethor realized. Perhaps their walls were there more because some among the inhabitants believed a city
should
have walls than because they needed them for any particular reason. Ornaments for a metropolis.
The breakwater led them to a boulevard that passed through one of the empty gates; then they were among the people of the city, Hethor and his whole crowd of correct people.
These folk were impossibly tall, legs like storks' with arms to match, their bodies thin as knives. None of them were as short as six feet, and Hethor would have put most of them closer to eight. Their skin was coffee-dark, their features their own rather than resembling any race Hethor had ever seen. Noses were long and angled, ears had enormous lobes, and their brows were ridged as if all of them frowned with the labor of constant great thought.
They were all dressed in fabrics of a hundred colors. Each robe or sash or blouse was dyed to shame any rainbow. Most of the colors jarred the eye, inharmonious compositions laid over contradictory essays in hue and tone. There were animal skins and chains and other accessories in abundance, and most carried thuribles or wands, as a gypsy fortune-teller might.
Hethor even saw one fellow of middling height, about seven feet, made up with a white face and ruffed tunic, looking like nothing so much as a clown, walking a goat on a leash. Others had animals as well. Familiars, perhaps.
Every man was a sorcerer, every woman a witch. What else could they be? Not a single one of them seemed to notice Hethor or the correct people. This was beyond haughtiness or indifference—though no one collided with them, none made eye contact, none stared, none stopped them to ask what they were about.
Hethor could not even imagine walking the streets of New Haven or Boston with a mob of hairy little men carrying spears. There would be riots or arrests, or both, in very short order. Here, they might as well have been ghosts.
The strangest thing was that the clicking sound of gears, Hethor's gift from his deafness, was almost overwhelming with these sorcerer-folk. Among the correct people, he only heard the inner sounds at the height of emotion and sensory stimulation or on the edge of sleep. Here, just walking down the smooth-slabbed street, each of the witches and sorcerers he passed thundered like the works of a church steeple clock in need of lubrication.
Either the residents of this city were much closer to God or much farther away from God than most folk. Hethor would wager on distance, not nearness, but perhaps that was just his prejudice.
“These are a strange race,” Arellya said to him. “They make even you seem ordinary.”
He had to laugh, though somehow, she pained his heart at the same time.
THEY SEARCHED
through the city most of the rest of the day, weaving their way through the circled walls and towering gates.
“What if we are lost?” Hethor asked at one point, looking down yet another curving street of oversized brown buildings.
“Correct people do not lose their way,” said Arellya. “If we walk somewhere, we can always walk back.”
“I'm glad some of us can do that,” Hethor muttered.
The inattention of the residents continued to grate on him. It really did seem as if Hethor and the correct people were walking dead. Did this foretell some horrible doom at dusk, as in an E. A. Poe story? Or perhaps it was something else, some aspect of their bodies and their minds, strange physiologies suitable for life under the African sun and the practice of magic.
Not that he really believed in magic. But Hethor had seen, and done, too many strange and wondrous things the past few months since leaving home to be so certain of his doubts, either.
In the late afternoon the party made their way into the city center, where there was a great square. More accurately a round, as it were. This was bordered by the smallest stone structures Hethor had seen so far in the city, low-walled rectangles that looked as though they might have been intended for market booths or stalls, though there was no market here.
A few dozen of the local citizenry passed through the square, colorful as ever. Just like the rest of the city there seemed to be no idlers. All of these magical folk walked briskly on their missions, having scarcely more time or recognition for each other than they did for their uninvited visitors.
At the center of the square was a pillar shaped much like
the lighthouse, though smaller, perhaps fifty feet in height. Chains dangled down its sides. At the top a man was bound.
Simeon Malgus,
Hethor realized with a chill in his heart. He knew now where the navigator had landed in his fall from Heaven.
“There is my guide,” he told Arellya, pointing upward.
“Do you plan to follow him there?”
“No.” Hethor's mouth set, grim and firm. “Is there any way to fetch him down?”
“Certainly.”
Arellya went into a whispered conference with the other correct people. The males gestured and made hand signs. The whole group of them except for her scampered away, swarming about the base of the tower.
Hethor watched in some amazement as the correct people formed a mass, climbing on one another's backs and shoulders, until the leaders could reach the hanging chains. They shifted to a sort of hairy-man ladder that would be the envy of any troupe of acrobats, and passed some of their smaller members up to the top.
The result of this effort was that four correct people stood around Malgus on the crown of the pillar. Each carried a flint or bronze knife with him. They went to work undoing his chains, breaking the bonds by dint of slow, careful effort rather than the brute force that was lacking from both their materials and their slight frames.
Some minutes passed; then Malgus was handed over the edge. They lowered him past the stone talons of the top of the tower and into the arms of the correct people straining just below.
But his weight was too much. Hethor watched with dawning horror as the acrobatic ladder swayed, correct people scrabbling for purchase against the stone or grasping onto the chains.
The collapse came with the awful inevitability of the toppling of some forest giant. Correct people leapt or fell away from the tower as Malgus slid free. Tumbling as he fell, his body took one horrible bounce on the stone.
Hethor sprinted toward the tower base while correct people screeched and thumped down onto the plaza. Some of the hairy men seemed seriously injured, but Hethor's only focus was on Simeon Malgus.
Malgus had landed just against the base of his prison-pillar, lying on his left side facing out. His left arm was folded out of sight behind him, in what had to be a horrible fracture. His legs lay unnaturally still. They did not even shiver like the rest of him. Blood seeped from his nose and pooled at the lower corner of his mouth. His rounded face was drawn and chapped, and when his lids fluttered, Malgus' brown eyes seemed clouded.
“My apprentice comes,” Malgus said in a weak voice. He gave a shuddering gasp. Then, “Ill met, Hethor.”
“Navigator Malgus.” Hethor reached down, took the dying man's right hand. It shuddered. Even within the skin Hethor could feel a movement that seemed to correspond to the gears-within-gears sounds he had been hearing. He had an intense sensation of Malgus as nothing more—or less—than an assemblage of tiny machines, tinier machines within them.
“You are a fool,” Malgus said, his eyes fluttering shut again.
“I have killed you when I meant to save you.” Hethor turned Malgus' hand over within his own, his heart banded tight with pain. “I am the fool.”
Malgus' breath hissed hollow and loud like a bellows within his chest. He ignored Hethor. Around them, correct people keened and chattered over their wounded. Speaking English to Malgus, Hethor found the language of his helpers to be just so many clicks and whistles again.
“Nothing is … ,” Malgus began, then stopped. He opened his eyes. “Do not believe.”

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