The Clockwork Three

by Matthew J. Kirby

  “I heard something, Mister Slag,” the voice said. He seemed to be standing just on the other side of the wall of crates.

  Frederick had to move. He turned to the right, away from the ladder, and crept along the wall, putting distance between himself and the voice.

  “You don’t even know what you have stolen,” the voice said, and then broke off in a fit of coughing.

  Frederick pressed on, leaving the voice behind. He reached the end of the crates, the end of the wall, and could go no farther. Around the last stack he spied a door, leading who knew where. But it was the only way out. He would have only one chance, but if his pursuers had locked the door on their way in, he had no chance.

  Frederick hunkered down, ready to spring.

  “Leave the Magnus head here, where it will be safe,” the voice said.

  Frederick leaped from behind the crates, his feet pounding. He reached the door.

  “There!” shouted the voice.

  Frederick heard an instant thunder, like trees falling toward him.

  He grabbed the doorknob. It turned. Frederick shouldered the door open and ran.

  There was a long hallway, and then another door, and then Frederick burst into the museum. It was as quiet and dark as the storeroom had been. High windows admitted failing moonlight, and the glass cases all around him caught slivers of it. Frederick took a few steps around the nearest display, unable to see what it was. He had been to the museum several times and knew the layout, and if he could identify a display he could orient himself and try to escape through the front entrance.

  The door flew open behind him, and Frederick bolted, bumping into panes of glass and ropes in the darkness. He heard something shatter over his shoulder, and a curse from the nasal voice.

  “You imbecile! That urn was Mayan! Irreplaceable!”

  Clod and Slag were having trouble, too.

  As he moved, Frederick kept one hand out in front of him, with his body turned sideways to protect the bronze head in his other arm. The museum wings all pointed at the central rotunda under the dome, and Frederick ran in the direction he guessed it to be.

  Then he tripped into a roped-off display. The impact knocked his breath from him, but he ducked and kept the bronze head safe at the expense of his shoulder. He jumped to his feet, gasping, and banged his head on something metal. Above him, an empty suit of armor charged on an invisible horse, arm outstretched. Frederick knew right where he was.

  “He’s up there!” the voice shouted.

  Frederick hopped over the rope and sprinted for the rotunda. Moments later he raced into its open space, feet clacking on the stone floor. He slowed as he approached the front doors. Bolts at the top and bottom locked them fast from the inside. Frederick hopped up and stooped down to pull them open, and then threw himself out onto the square.

  The door banged shut behind him, and then open again. Frederick took the museum steps four and five at a time, landing on the cobblestones in a stumble that almost sent him sprawling. He sprinted over the square, the bronze head under his arm. A quick backward glance and he slowed down. His pursuers had stopped chasing him.

  Clod and Slag hulked at the top of the museum steps, expressionless mountains, and in the valley between them Mister Diamond shook his fist. He had wild gray hair, and a face red from running.

  “Believe me, you will regret this!” Mister Diamond shouted.

  He motioned with his hands, and Clod and Slag turned away from the square. They lumbered back inside the museum, and after a final sneer Mister Diamond followed them, slamming the door behind him.

  Frederick wiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. Why had they stopped? They could have overtaken him in the open square.

  He felt his heartbeat slow from a gallop to a trot. He looked down at the bronze head and wondered what he was doing with it. What had possessed him? He should have left it and followed Giuseppe and Hannah up the ladder. They could have all escaped together. But instead he had reacted on impulse, without forethought, and now Mister Diamond knew his name and where to find him. He had to return the bronze head.

  But not tonight. It would have to be done in a way that would avoid coming into contact with Clod and Slag, or Mister Diamond. Frederick dropped to his knee and set the bronze head on the ground. He removed his coat, and bundled the head inside it.

  On his way back to Master Branch’s shop he saw a little street musician playing the flute. Trying to play the flute. And it looked like the people out at that time of night were not the sort that spared a coin. The boy’s cap was nearly empty. Frederick thought of Giuseppe and felt bad for this tiny busker. He wished he had money to give him, or some way to help, but could only smile and nod.

  “You’re out pretty late,” Frederick said.

  The boy stopped. “I no can go back.” He looked down at his cap. “I no have money.”

  “Maybe it’s the song you’re playing.”

  The boy looked at his flute.

  “Try this one.” Frederick hummed the melody his mother used to sing to him, the melody Giuseppe had played earlier that night. “It’s pretty simple, isn’t it? Can you play that?”

  The little boy pinched his brow and closed his eyes. He lifted the flute to his lips, and played the song with several missteps the first time through, but he corrected them and got through the tune. When he opened his eyes, he smiled.

  “That a good song,” he said.

  “My mother used to sing it to me. And I heard it from … another busker who played it.”

  “Who play it?”

  “Uh …” Was there harm in telling him a name? “A chap by the name of Giuseppe.”

  The little boy looked suddenly stricken. His shoulders fell and his eyes welled up.

  “Hey,” Frederick said. “Hey there, it’s all right. What’s wrong?”

  The little boy shook his head and started to pack up his things.

  “Do you know Giuseppe?” Frederick asked.

  The busker nodded. “He dead.”

  Frederick wondered if he should say anything, but the boy looked so despondent. “No, he isn’t.”

  The boy’s eyes opened wide.

  “He’s alive and well.” But Frederick thought better of telling the boy that Giuseppe was hiding in Master Branch’s cellar. “What’s your name?”

  “Pietro.”

  “Pietro, play that song I taught you, Giuseppe’s song, and I bet you get money by the fistful.”

  “Thank you,” Pietro said. “Thank you.” He turned and ran off.

  Frederick walked the rest of the way to Master Branch’s shop. He hoped that Hannah and Giuseppe would be there waiting for him, and they were, in the alley behind the shop. Both of them seemed relieved when they saw him, but then they became angry. Giuseppe just stood there with his arms folded, and Hannah came up and hit Frederick on his shoulder.

  “What were you thinking?” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Frederick said.

  Then she noticed the bundle under his arm. “You didn’t!”

  Frederick averted his eyes. “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “You didn’t have a choice about whether you stole that creepy head from the museum? Whether you almost got us caught?”

  It was not stolen. “I’m borrowing it. And no, I didn’t really have a choice. I’ll return it when I’m done studying it. Besides, you stole Madame Pomeroy’s necklace.”

  Hannah snorted, and threw up her hands.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Frederick said. “I didn’t mean to get you into trouble.”

  “It’s fine, Freddy.” Giuseppe stepped toward him. “But next time we stick together. Got it?”

  Frederick nodded.

  Giuseppe pointed at the shop door. “I need to get inside off the street.”

  “Of course,” Frederick said, and reached into his pocket for the key.

  “I’m going home,” Hannah said. “It’s late.”

  “You don’t want to come inside?” Fred
erick asked. “To see the head?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “No, Frederick. Good night.”

  “Good night,” Giuseppe said.

  Frederick watched her stalk off down the street, feeling a little embarrassed, but the moment did not last long. He looked at Giuseppe and shrugged.

  “I can’t wait to get inside. Would you mind holding this?” He handed Giuseppe the bundle and unlocked the door. A few moments later they were standing in the cellar, the bronze head propped on the workbench next to the clockwork man.

  “Hannah seemed mad,” Giuseppe said.

  “She’ll be fine.”

  “So what are you going to do now?” Giuseppe asked.

  Frederick flexed his fingers. “I’m going to figure out how it works. What it does.”

  “Will that take a long time?”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “Then I’m going to sleep.” Giuseppe swiped the sheet from the clockwork man and bunched it up. He lay down on the floor with the sheet under his head for a pillow. “Wake me up when you’ve got it all sorted out.”

  Frederick ignored him. The clockwork head, the Magnus head, rested peacefully. Whether the name was accurate, and this was indeed the lost bronze head created by Albertus Magnus, was irrelevant. The clockwork inside was all that mattered. Frederick pressed on the button at the back of the head, and the forehead opened up.

  Even though he had already seen it once before, the staggering workmanship drew a sigh out of Frederick. He took several minutes, and just admired it without touching, without sticking his fingers in it. The skills required to create such a clockwork were beyond any that Frederick possessed, or had read about, or heard of, even in the most grandiose boasting at the guildhall.

  The Magnus head showed its age. Inside it, tiny dings and dents, speckled tarnish, and a buildup of black grime in the cracks and corners all spoke to its origins in antiquity. Frederick assessed the tools and materials he would need to disassemble and restore it, and retrieved them from the workshop upstairs. By the time he returned to the cellar, Giuseppe’s chest was rising and falling in the slow rhythm of sleep.

  Frederick went to work with deliberate reverence, refusing to allow his excitement to rush him. The entire skull came off in sections, which Frederick polished inside and out, restoring shine to the wire hair. The density of the exposed mass of cogs and gears brought a shiver of fear and awe. Frederick studied every piece before he removed and cleaned it, until he was sure he could replace it when he went to reconstruct the head. A sheaf of loose pages bore his scribbled notes and a few sketches in case he forgot some of the more intricate connections.

  After some hours he was able to deduce how small regions of the bronze head worked, but regions only. The jaw, lips, and leather tongue, the ridged bells in the throat. The delicate filaments attached to a vellum drum in the ear. In isolation each area seemed to perform an obvious if limited function, but how all the different parts worked together eluded him.

  There was a larger pattern he was missing, like a painting that was too big to see all at once. He could observe isolated figures and brushstrokes, but not the work as a whole. The farther he stepped away from it, the larger the painting grew, as though this genius assembly of clockwork combined to become something greater than a simple combination of the parts would suggest. An alchemy of arithmetic where two plus two equaled ten.

  But then Frederick noticed something. A portion of the head appeared damaged. He could not say exactly how he knew that. After hours of dissection this clockwork’s small movement simply felt wrong, and more than that, Frederick had a sense of how it should be. Guided by instinct, he set about restoring the gears and levers, rasping off a little burr here, and bending a cog there, shifting a few gears slightly, until it seemed that the movement fit with the surrounding mechanisms.

  After that, it was with a feeling of satisfaction that Frederick began to piece the Magnus head back together, a process that took much less time than it had to take it apart.

  “Have you figured out how it works?”

  Frederick turned and saw that Giuseppe had awoken. The busker knelt on the floor with his hands on his knees, sheet wrinkles imprinted on one side of his face.

  “No,” Frederick said into the gears.

  “What time is it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I’ll go check.” Giuseppe climbed the stairs, and a moment later came back down. “The sun’s not up yet, but there’s light out there.”

  Frederick replaced the skull plates, locking them together like puzzle pieces.

  Giuseppe came and watched over Frederick’s shoulder. “What if you stuck that head on the body you made?”

  Frederick looked up at the ceiling. “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because this head was not designed for that body. And it needs to be my original work for the guild examination.” But Giuseppe’s question raised a possibility in Frederick’s mind he had not considered. He had assumed the head was a self-contained automaton. The legend Master Branch had told him mentioned only a head, and that was how he had tried to understand its design. But what if there had once been a body?

  There was a flash in his mind, and pieces began to make sense to him. A tiny gyroscope near the middle of the head, which had perplexed Frederick, might have been a balancing mechanism for an upright clockwork man. And the action and movements that appeared without purpose might have instead been incomplete. Perhaps that was why Frederick could not see how the Magnus head worked. He only had a portion of the painting.

  “Frederick,” Giuseppe said. “I’m kind of hungry.”

  “In a moment.” What could the rest of the body have been like? He picked up the last plate.

  “Do you have some food to spare?”

  “I’m sure we do.” Frederick locked the plate in place. He felt a subtle stirring under his fingertips.

  “Maybe some bread?”

  “Shh.” Frederick cocked his head. “Do you hear that?”

  “What?”

  Frederick leaned his ear in close to the Magnus head. “That whirring.”

  “Let me see.” Giuseppe brought his head in close.

  In that moment, there was a sound like two coins being rubbed together, and the Magnus head opened its eyes. Giuseppe jumped back, and Frederick stood up straight. Then the bronze jaw slid open, then it closed, then it opened again, accompanied by a wheezing of air.

  “Freddy?”

  “I don’t know,” Frederick whispered.

  A sound emerged from the Magnus head, a metallic thrumming, like a low bell struck continuously. Then the mouth moved, shaping the sound. “Cuuuurrrr …?” The sound stopped.

  “Did it just —?” For the first time since Frederick had known him, Giuseppe looked frightened.

  “Yes. It spoke.”

  The sound came again, resonant and stronger. “Cuurr?”

  “What is it saying?” Giuseppe said.

  “I don’t know.”

  Frederick bent down and looked into the clockwork eyes, two spinning discs with slits all the way around, flickering like a magic lantern show. Were they seeing him? How could something be so terrifying and so exhilarating at the same time?

  “Cur?” the Magnus head asked.

  “I think it’s broken,” Giuseppe said, frustration and fear in his voice.

  Frederick reached around the head, afraid to touch it, repulsed by the living vibration, and pressed the button. As the forehead panel fell open, the motions ground to a halt, the mouth closed, the eyes dimmed, and the turning of clockwork ceased.

  “I need to think,” Frederick said, staring at it.

  Giuseppe inched closer. “About?”

  “What to say to it.”

  “I think maybe it’s broken,” Giuseppe said.

  Frederick rolled his eyes. “It’s not broken.”

  “How do you know?” Giuseppe asked.

  “The same way I knew how to fix
it.”

  “Well, I’m not so sure.” Giuseppe came around to the head and stooped down. He stared into the clockwork so close his eyes crossed. “It doesn’t sound like it’s working right.”

  That was true. “Let’s consider all the possibilities.” Frederick held up his finger. “One. It’s broken.”

  Giuseppe nodded as if he had already made up his mind about that one.

  Frederick held up a second finger. “Two. It is not broken, and is saying a word we don’t know.”

  Giuseppe shrugged.

  “Wait a minute.” Frederick dropped his hand to his side. An idea seemed ready to light on his head, and he froze where he stood, afraid he would scare it away if he moved. “Why would it be an English word?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Master Branch said Albertus Magnus was German.”

  “So you think that’s a German word?”

  “Maybe. Unless …”

  Giuseppe frowned. “Unless what?”

  “Master Branch also said that Albertus Magnus was a magician and a friar.”

  “So?” Giuseppe said.

  Frederick grinned. “I think it’s Latin.”

  “What’s Latin?” Giuseppe asked.

  Frederick looked up at the ceiling. “Of course.”

  “What’s Latin?” Giuseppe asked again.

  Frederick explained, “It’s an ancient language. All the priests and monks in the Old Country spoke and wrote in Latin because they thought it was holy. A friar wouldn’t have made the head talk in German, or English, or any common tongue.”

  “So, who knows Latin?” Giuseppe asked.

  “Master Branch does,” Frederick said.

  “But I’m guessing,” Giuseppe said, “that you won’t be asking him to translate for a metal head you stole — sorry, borrowed from the Archer Museum.”

  “He has books, dictionaries.” Frederick slapped the table. “Wait here.”

  He raced out of the cellar, but slowed when he reached the stairs to Master Branch’s apartment. The rest of the way up, the floorboards seemed to crack and squeal as if they were trying to get him caught. At the top of the staircase he paused and listened to the faint snoring coming from the old man’s bedroom before searching the books. He had an idea of where the Latin books were, having seen them on his way to finding The Clockmaker’s Grimoire. He grabbed one and returned to the cellar.