Mainspring (8 page)

Authors: Jay Lake

BOOK: Mainspring

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“Can you take a message for me, Sergeant?”

“You've got a ma'am somewhere wondering after you?”

“No.” Hethor had no memory of his mother at all, and only the one, slim year with Mistress Bodean to fill that hole in his heart. “But there's a man who drinks down at Anthony's on Pier Four. Malthus, Malgus. Something. Tell him I'm here.”

Ellis stopped in front of a huge iron-bound door to fish out a key. “And why would he care about you, lad?” the sergeant asked gently.

“He won't care about me at all.” Hethor stepped quickly through the door so Ellis didn't have to shove him. “But he might care about my message.”

The door slammed shut, the sergeant's final words, if any, muffled by the wood.

Hethor stepped into the darkness, sweeping his foot carefully in front of him. He realized he was in a tiny chamber rather like a mudroom except for being deep underground. He found something solid that thumped at the knock of his boots. A moment's exploration with his hands revealed that another door stood in front of him. In a rush of panic, afraid of being locked in a little closet to starve, Hethor grabbed for the latch of the second door and threw it open.

Beyond there were stars. Tiny glints twinkled high and low.

Hethor stood blinking, trying to figure out what it was he saw, until he realized that a multitude of candles was set before him. Dark, ragged shapes stretched between them.

Some moved.

A bent man approached Hethor, took his hand, rubbed Hethor's clean fingers between grimy calluses. “Welcome, son,” the man whispered in a voice so tiny Hethor had to lean forward to hear it. “Welcome to the pit of the candlemen.”

The bent man led Hethor to a pallet of rags between four lit candles. Up close, Hethor could see that pounds, perhaps hundredweights, of wax were melted in flowing mounds to serve as bases for those tapers that yet burned. It was a century's worth of candles or more, burning down here forever. He wondered how long the bent man had been here.

He also wondered how long the pallet's previous inhabitant had been here.

He lay back with the top of his head pillowed against flows of wax and listened to his breath and his pulse and his unshed tears, listened to the sputtering pop of the candles and the ragged breathing of the candlemen, listened to the gentle sweating of the bricks and stone beneath the wax.

Under it all, the world turned, the rattle ever louder. Hethor didn't even have to strain to hear it. There was something wrong. Some escapement or fusee was out of time with the gears of the world. God's Creation was like a sick clock not yet gone to ruin but set almost inexorably on that path.

Lost among the candlemen, Hethor knew with a terrible certainty that the world was going wrong. Only he could fix it.

Only he couldn't, not here.

The little lights flickered, spotting the darkness even as Hethor slipped into exhausted sleep, dogged in his flickering dreams by William's voice.

THREE

“BREAK YOUR
fast, boy?”

Hethor awoke with a start. His body spasmed against cold stone. Darkness around him glittered with tiny flames, each point of light bringing his memories back with it. He had been dreaming of his feather pillow and pallet in Master Bodean's attic, and how only a week before, his greatest worries had been steering clear of Headmaster Brownlee and improving his command of the art of filing the correct gear ratios onto the smallest of the blank wheels.

“I'm sorry,” Hethor whispered to the candleman who crouched next to him on hands and knees. “I'm not hungry.”

“Never hungry in this heart of stone,” the candleman said matter-of-factly. “Not no one. Still, a man's got to eat if he's going to live.”

Hethor supposed the candleman had a point. He pulled himself up into a squat, back and joints protesting from time spent on cold stone and chunky wax, then scuttled after the man who had come to fetch him.

A number of the prisoners were seated in a circle. They were surrounded by a veritable rampart of candle wax.
The top of the lumpy, flowing wall was lit by still more candles. Hethor had no sense of the size of the room, other than of a great space, for the flickering flames made the darkness around them all the more impenetrable.

He would have preferred less light and more vision.

His guide brought Hethor into the circle, patted a place on a little seat of wax worn by years of buttocks, then crawled to his own place.

“Welcome,” said another candleman. It might have been the same one who had greeted Hethor the night before. He seemed to be the spokesman.

If it had been the night before, Hethor realized with a shiver. His sense of time told him it was morning. The clattering of the Earth was almost loud here, a metronome overriding the confusion of the darkness, but there was no way to check the passage of sidereal midnight, no validation at all.

No master clock save the one he carried within.

“Thank you,” Hethor said belatedly, recovering from his train of thought. “I'mâ”

“No,” the candleman said firmly as he raised a hand. “We have but one rule here in the pit. Slow, go slow. Your least bit of news is a treasure to be gleaned and passed about from man to man. Do not scatter lightly now what you will prize later.”

“I see.”

“In the pit of the candlemen, no one sees.”

They all intoned, “No one sees.”

“I hear,” said Hethor with a flash of understanding. He
did
hear, after all, the music of the Earth below all the levels of life. That strange gift he had always had, commonplace to him but seemingly peculiar as some rumored power of a sorcerer from the Southern Earth the few times he had tried to explain it.

He understood their darkness in a basic, primitive way. “What of you, then?”

“We are waiting here,” said the spokesman.

Hethor considered that answer. He inhaled deeply,
smelling wax and sweating stone and distant slops and unwashed candlemen. He listened to his breathing and theirs, the hiss of hundreds of candle flames and the unaccountably loud sounds of the Earth. He looked around the glimmering darkness.

Panic clawed his throat. It recalled the sensation of drowning in a river. He'd nearly done so one summer when he was nine, tangled in the rotting branches of an old log in the current, willing to mortgage his soul for one more breath of air.

“Please â¦” Hethor choked out the word, fighting his desire to scream and bolt from the prison even if he had to claw through stone to do it. Surely they all felt that in this place. These men were buried, dead as the Brass Christ in his tomb, with no angel to roll back the stone.

Someone pressed a bowl into his hand. It was cool to the touch, and a little rough. He could barely see it even in the candlelight, but with his other hand Hethor found a pile of boiled eggs. He took one and passed the bowl along.

Soon there was a sound of peeling and chomping as the candlemen ate. Still there were no words.

Another bowl came, almost the same as the first, this one filled with a soppy mess of which Hethor took a fingered scoop. Rolled oats with a trace of honey, he decided from the smell. He passed that bowl, then licked his fingers clean.

When the third bowl came, he finally realized what he was holding. They were the tops of skulls, round as his own head and no bigger. Hethor shrieked and nearly dropped it.

The candleman to his right, who had not spoken before, said in a soft voice, “If you don't like sausage, please just pass it on.”

“The bowl â¦”

“We share everything here in the pit,” said the spokesman. “Even ourselves, once we are gone.”

“What is this place?” Hethor asked desperately.

“In eighteen hundred and seventy-one, Viceroy Earl Cornwallis caused engineers from London's Metropolitan Railway to come to Boston and create a tube train here. He built a line from the harbor to the viceregal offices at Massachusetts House. From here it ran onward to the west end of Boston Common.”

That was not the answer Hethor had expected. “What?”

“The candlemen's pit is the Massachusetts House Station.”

“We even have a locomotive here,” croaked another voice out of the flickering shadows. Pride still echoed within the reedy weakness of age.

An underground railroad? In a prison?
They are all crazed
. What had William of Ghent done to him? “And you are the engineers?”

“Some of the oldest of us,” said the spokesman. “Some of us were laborers or draughtsmen. Others were placed here to wait for â¦ whatever.”

“As I amâ”

“Observe the rule!” the spokesman interrupted sharply. “Our stories are old, and may be freely told. Your story is new, and more precious than gold.”

“What happened to the rail line?” Hethor was trying to find a semblance of sanity among these half-mad, half-blind old men.

“Never opened,” said the spokesman. He sounded sad. “Viceroy Earl Cornwallis lost a son under the wheels of our test locomotive before the line was ever opened. In his grief, he had us all shut in here with the murdering machine. I believe they eventually shipped him home wrapped in madness.”

Surely Viceroy Lord Courtenay did not mean him to rot here for decades?
Hethor thought. He would be mad as these candlemen, and no more useful to himself or the world.

If the world indeed kept turning. He thought back to the fault in the noises he had heard as he had fallen
asleep. Something was going wrong in the heart of the world. The Key Perilous would be part of whatever was needed to set it to right. Whatever and wherever the Key was.

“I don't want to be here,” Hethor whispered.

“None do,” a voice responded from around the circle. “We are lost to life. You will no more escape this place than you will fly across the great Wall at the waist of the world. Not till you are born once more into the light.”

“Kennard âas flown over't,” cackled another. “Ain't'ch'a, Kenn? Magic and hoody-men walkin' on corpse-legs beyond, na?”

There was a mumbled response. The circle began to rustle as men shifted their weight.

“Please,” said Hethor. “There must be appeal. Some escape.”

“'Tis not so bad,” said his neighbor to the right. A ragged hand touched his arm.

“We all keep nearby,” said another.

Around him, the candlemen began to shuffle closer together, closer to Hethor, their bodies one by one blocking the candlelight as their hands reached out for him. Rough-scarred fingers stroked his face, his hair, his body, tugging at his pants, touching him, touching, touching.

With a scream he leapt to his feet, only to crack his head on a stone arch. Hethor collapsed into the heap of candlemen, terrified for his life. They reached once more for him when a bright light stabbed into them all.

The candlemen screeched, shouted, scuttled away from the brilliant beam. A group of men walked through distant doors carrying bull's-eye lanterns and waving staves.

“Line 'em up,” someone shouted. “Every able-bodied man fall in, right now!”

Hethor scrambled on hands and knees toward the newcomers, eager to be away from the candlemen, no matter what the cost. He tried to get to his feet, but the throbbing in his head made him sick to his stomach. He missed his footing and slid flat on the floor.

“Corne along, vou monkeys, or you'll be billy-damned sorry,” roared the shouting man.

Choking, Hethor got to his feet. He staggered forward. “Wait for me,” he gasped. “Please, wait.”

“This place is scuppered,” said another voice in a thick Scottish accent. “Dinna see what the fewk we come for. Wastin' our time with them broken old bastards. Dark as yon eclipse in here, 'tis, and them all blind as stones.”

“No!” Hethor tried to shout, but his stomach heaved so hard the words came out in a strangled cough.

Hands grabbed at his ankles and his calves, tugging him back into the flickering darkness. A wave of fury and fear drove Hethor forward. They had come for him. He knew it. He fought his tormenters to chase after the lanterns bobbing through the door. “Wait for me!” he shouted.

The last one in the line paused, the light sweeping back once more into the pit of the candlemen. It caught Hethor in the face. He madly waved even as more hands tried to pull him down. Hethor kicked a candleman in the face, then stumbled into the lantern's glare.

“Well and you're nae prize,” said the Scottish voice. A great hand grabbed Hethor's shoulder and yanked him out the first door, then the second, into the brick corridor beyond.

“Is he fit?” asked the first man, the one who had shouted for the prisoners to fall in.

“Fit enough, by the white bird,” said Phelps quietly. The little man stood in the corridor with Sergeant Ellis, a few feet away from the party with their lanterns and staves.

Hethor tried not to stare at Phelps. His message to the mysterious Malgus at Anthony's must have gotten through. They really
had
come for him. His eyes ached in the lantern's glare. Someone felt the muscles of Hethor's arms and shoulders.

Phelps smiled, nodding slowly, acting for all the world like he'd never before laid eyes on Hethor. “He'll do.”

Hethor found himself being dragged down the corridor faster than he could walk. He was surrounded by a chatter of voices talking about weight and lift and drag and everything except the most important thing of all.

What were they going to do with him, now that he had been rescued from the pit?

THE GROUP
that took him from the prison turned out to be six men including the leader and the vocal Scot. They bundled Hethor into an enclosed wagon of the sort used by the bobbies to round up drunks and criminals. But they all followed him in. He noted that the door was not locked.

Inside the black Mariah with its tiny, high windows, his eyes had a chance to adjust to the light once more. He realized these men with their striped shirts and canvas jackets were sailors. One even wore a gold hooped earring just like the engravings in the Boy's Own books he'd read as a child. They carried on a multisided conversation that seemed to be all talking and no listening.

“Ain't never seen nothing like that place. Like some demon-hell out of the south.”

“Straddle me and me mum both, you've been to the Gambia
and
Formosa. Don't bet that's the worser's ever been seen by the likes of us.”

“All right, you stupid arse-licker, but 'tain't nothing like it in a proper English city.”

“Who the bloody fewk says Boston's a proper English city?”

They all laughed.

“Excuse me,” Hethor said.