The Impossible Cube: A Novel of the Clockwork Empire (39 page)

“Gavin!” Alice breathed. “Are those wings?”

The fun of writing semihistorical fiction is the ability to pick and choose interesting pieces of history while ignoring or altering anything that doesn’t suit the story. I will no doubt be excoriated by historians both amateur and professional who want to point out that the incandescent lightbulb wasn’t widely used until at least 1885, nearly thirty years after
The Doomsday Vault
and
The Impossible Cube
, or that the first paraffin oil (kerosene) refinery was constructed in Poland in 1859, not in Ukraine by 1858. Of course, such people ignore semi-intelligent windup cats, talking mechanical valets, and artificial limbs made of brass.

For the record, the
Consolatrix Afflictorum
is a real statue of the Virgin Mary in Luxembourg, and local legend has it that she fell out of a tree trunk in 1624, right around the time the bubonic plague struck the region. The stories say her touch cured a number of the afflicted, and so many people came to visit her shrine outside the city that in the late 1790s, the statue was moved to the Church of Our Lady (Notre Dame) inside the city walls.

Also in reality, Nicolas Adames was made vicar of that church in 1863. Gavin and Alice visit Vicar Adames in 1858, so perhaps in our fictional reality, Adames’s predecessor died of the clockwork plague and granted him an early promotion.

In the historical 1870, Adames was named Bishop of Luxembourg, and the Church of Our Lady became Notre Dame Cathedral. I like to think it happened in fiction, too.

Ukraine has a long and sad history. Her rich farmlands made her a target for emperors who wanted to feed their armies, and she has at various times been overrun by Russians, Poles, Mongols, and Germans. In the 1700s, in both reality and in this work of fiction, Ukraine was divided in half by Russia and Poland. (Many modern people have forgotten—or never knew—that Poland was once a world-class military power.) Russia and Poland were far from kind in their rule, and in 1768, Maksym Zalizniak and Ivan Gonta led a Cossack rebellion against their oppressors. In history, they slaughtered the Poles and took over right-bank (western) Ukraine right handily. Afraid that the rebellion would spread to left-bank (eastern) Ukraine, Empress Catherine of Russia flooded the area with troops. Ivan Gonta was captured and chopped into fourteen pieces so his remains could be displayed in fourteen different towns as a deterrent to further uprisings. Maksym Zalizniak was captured and tortured but managed to escape with fifty-one of his men. He vanished, and his final fate remains unknown. Both men became national heroes, the subject of numerous Ukrainian folktales and songs.

In my fictional world, the clockwork plague arrived just before the rebellion, thanks to Dr. Clef and the Impossible Cube, so Ivan Gonta and Maksym Zalizniak were rather more successful. Although it would have been easy to have the downtrodden Ukrainians create a
utopia for themselves, I was forced to remember that the rebellion was fomented by eighteenth-century Cossacks, who weren’t known for their tolerance or compassion. Fortunately, Ukraine has at last regained her independence, both in modern reality and in my semihistorical fiction, and with it, perhaps she can regain her former glory as well.

—Steven Harper

“I
still think this is a terrible idea,” said Alice.

Gavin spread his mechanical wings, furled them, and spread them again. He shrugged at Alice’s words and shot a glance across the deck at Susan Phipps, who set her jaw and tightened her grip on the helm. Her brass hand, the one with six fingers, gleamed in the afternoon sun and a stray flicker of light caught Gavin in the face. The world slowed, shaving time into transparent slices, and for one of them he felt trillions of photons ricochet off his skin and carom away in rainbow arcs. His mind automatically tried to calculate trajectory for them, and the numbers spun and swirled in an enticing whirlpool. He bit his lip and forced himself out of it. There were more important—more
exciting
—issues at hand.

“I completely agree,” Phipps said. “But he’s the captain of the ship, and he can do as he likes, even if it’s idiotic.”

“Captains are supposed to listen to common sense,”
Alice replied in tart British tones. “Especially when the common sense comes from someone with a decent amount of intelligence.”

At that Gavin had to smile. A soft breeze spun itself across the Caspian Sea, winding across the deck of the
Lady of Liberty
to stir his pale blond hair. He started to count the strands that flicked across his field of vision, note the way each one was lifted by the teamwork of gas particles, then bit his lip again. Damn it, he was getting more and more distractible by minutiae. More and more individual details of the world around him beckoned—the drag of the harness on his back, the creak of the airship’s wooden deck, the borders of the shadow cast by her bulbous silk envelope high overhead, the sharp smell of the exhaust exuded from the generator that puffed and purred on the decking, the gentle thrumming of the propellered nacelles that pushed the
Lady
smoothly ahead, the shifting frequency of the blue light reflected by the Caspian Sea gliding past only a few yards beneath the
Lady
’s hull. Sometimes it felt like the world was a jigsaw puzzle of exquisite jewels, and he needed to examine each piece in exacting detail.

“Gavin?” Alice’s worried voice came to him from far away, and yanked him back to the ship. “Are you there?”

Damn it.
He forced his grin back to full power. “Yeah. Sure. Look, I’ll be fine. Everything’ll work. I’ve been over the machinery a thousand times, and I’ve made no mistakes.”

“Of course not.” Alice’s expression was tight. “Clockworkers never make mistakes with their inventions.”

Gavin’s grin faltered again and he shifted within the harness. She was worried about
him
, and that thrilled and shamed him both. It was difficult to stand next to her and not touch her, even to brush against her. Just looking at her made him want to sweep her into his arms, something she allowed him to do only sporadically.

“Alice, will you marry me?” he blurted out.

She blinked at him. “What?”

“Will you marry me?” Words poured out of him. “I started to ask you back in Kiev, but we got interrupted, and what with one thing and another, I never got the chance to ask again, and now there’s a small chance I’ll be dead, or at least seriously wounded, in the next ten minutes, so I want to know: Will you marry me?”

“Oh, good Lord,” Phipps muttered from the helm.

“I… I… Oh, Gavin, this isn’t the time,” Alice stammered.

He took both her hands in his. Adrenaline thrummed his nerves like cello strings. Alice’s left hand was covered by an iron spider that wrapped around her forearm, hand, and fingers to create a strange metal gauntlet, and the spider’s eyes glowed red at his touch. Gavin had his own machinery to contend with—the pair of metal wings harnessed to his back. They flared again when he shifted his weight.

“The universe will never give us the right time.” Gavin’s voice was low and light. “We have to make our own.”

“Dr. Clef tried to make time,” Alice said, “and look where it got him.”

“He wanted to keep it for himself.” Gavin looked
into Alice’s eyes. They were brown as good, clean earth, and just as deep. “We’ll share it with the world. I can’t offer you more than the open sky and every tune my fiddle will play, but will you marry me?”

“There’s no minister. Not even a priest!”

“So you’re saying you don’t want to.”

She flushed. “Oh, Gavin. I do, yes, I do. But—”

“No!” He held up a hand. “No
yes, but.
Just
yes.
And only if you mean it.”

“Ah. Very well.” Alice, Lady Michaels, took a deep breath. Her dress, a piece of sky pinned by the breeze, swirled about her. “Yes, Gavin. I will marry you.”

With a shout of glee, Gavin leaped over the edge.

Air tore past his ears and his stomach dropped. The
Lady
’s hull blurred past him, and perhaps two dozen yards below, the calm Caspian Sea shimmered hard and sharp and a little angry. Gavin spread his arms, moved his shoulders, and the wires attached to his body harness drew on tiny pulleys. The wings snapped open. The battery pack between his shoulder blades pulsed power, and blue light coruscated across the wings with a soft chime like that of a wet finger sliding over a crystal goblet. A matching blue light current glowed through a lacy endoskeleton underneath the
Lady
’s envelope above, giving her a delicate, elegant air. The endoskeleton and the wings were fashioned from the same alloy, though the wings consisted of tiny interwoven links of metal, much like chain mail. And when electricity pulsed through the alloy—

Gavin dove toward the water a moment longer, until the glow and the chime reached the very tips of his wings. In that moment, the alloy pushed against gravity
itself, and abruptly he was swooping back up, up, and up; by God, he was rising, climbing, ascending,
flying
and the wind pushed him higher with an invisible hand and the deck with Alice and Phipps upon it flashed by so fast, Gavin barely had time to register their surprised expressions and then the
Lady
’s curli-blue envelope plunged toward him like a whale falling onto a minnow and the wind tore his surprised yell away as a sacrifice, giving him just enough time to twist his body and turn the unfamiliar flapping wings—God, yes, they were
wings
—so that he skimmed up the side of the envelope so close his belly brushed the cloth and with dizzying speed he was above the ship, looking down at her sleek envelope and her little rudder at the back and the fine net of ropes that cradled the ship like soft fingers and his body stretched in all directions with nothing below or above him. Every bit of his spirit rushed with exhilaration, flooded with absolute freedom. His legs in white leather and his feet in white boots hung beneath him, deliciously useless. His muscles moved, and the wings, made of azure light, flapped in response, lifting him into the cool, damp air, with bright Brother Sun calling to him, lifting body and soul. A rainbow of power gushed through him, and he was part of the heavens themselves, a whole note streaking through infinity, cleansed by wind and mist and shedding worries like grace notes. Gavin yelled and whooped, and his voice thundered across distant clouds as if it might split them in two.
This
was what he’d been born for. This was home.

He hung in the blue nothing for a tiny moment. His wings glowed and sang softly behind him. The clouds
spread a cottony pasture far away, and he could almost—almost—see gods and angels striding across them. A calm stole over him. It didn’t matter how many trillions of particles held him aloft or how gravity failed to function. It didn’t matter that a disease was coursing through his body and killing him bit by bit. There was blessed nothing. His mind slowed and joined the stillness. The wind sighed and Gavin hummed a soft note in response as the breeze curled about his white-clad body. Harmony. Peace. How perfect it was there.

A shadow below caught his eye. The
Lady
was still hovering just above the surface of the calm Caspian Sea. This was at Phipps’s insistence—if Gavin’s wings had failed, he wouldn’t have fallen far, and the ocean would have provided a more pleasant landing than hard ground. Perhaps five miles ahead of the ship lay a sliver of an island, and just beyond that, a rocky coast. The shadow was moving beneath the water, growing larger and larger beneath the
Lady
as whatever cast it moved up from the bottom of the sea. The thing was nothing natural. Unease bloomed quickly into concern and fear. Gavin tucked and dove, his wings pulled in tightly. He didn’t dare dive too quickly—he didn’t know how much the harness could take, even though his mind was automatically calculating foot pounds and stress levels. He shouted a warning to Alice and Phipps and felt the vibration of his vocal cords, sensed the compression of air, knew the sound would scatter helplessly long before it reached Alice’s eardrums, and still he shouted.

Half a mile below him, a pair of enormous black tentacles
rose up from the shadow and broke the surface of the water. At seven or eight feet thick, they easily looped themselves up and around the
Lady
with incredible speed, even though she was the size of a decent cottage. Fear chased Gavin’s heart out of his rib cage as he dove closer. He could hear Alice shrieking and Phipps yelling in thin, tinny voices that were ballooning into full volume. Air burned his cheeks as he dove past the envelope, now wrapped in suckered black flesh, and he caught the rank smell of ocean depths and old fish.

Instinct rushed him ahead. He had to reach Alice. No other thought but to reach her, to get her to safety. Even the
Lady
’s distress didn’t matter.

Below and just behind the ship, a black island rose from the waves. Eight other tentacles trailed in oily shadows beneath the ship, and a wicked horned beak large enough to crack an oak tree snapped open and shut. A single eye the size of a stagecoach stared up at Gavin, and he caught his own reflection in the dark iris. Inside Gavin a monster equal to the one below roared its anger. For a mad moment, he wondered if he could dive into the eye, punch both fists straight through cornea into vitreous goo and force the creature away. Grimly, he ended that line of thought, as it was foolish. Instead he made himself fling his wings open and end the dive with a sharp jerk that sent a red web of pain down his back and into his groin, where the flight harness was strapped to his lower body. He skimmed through a gap in the tentacles and the rope web that supported the
Lady
’s hull, twisting his body in ways that were already becoming reflexive, until he
could drop to the deck. His wings folded back into a metallic cloak that dragged at his back and shoulders once the blue glow faded and the chime stopped.