Enter the Clockworld

by Jared Mandani

  Besieged by many questions with not a single answer to them, I decided to concentrate on the tasks at hand, which was probably the wisest thing to do. They made us work on the walkers in the open air of the courtyard now, right where they lay as a pile, the way our workers dragged them in. The official explanation was we mechanics needed some fresh air, and that the walkers were far too heavy to drag them down to the basement. The real reason everyone knew straight off, and it was rather disturbing. We were about to be attacked in retaliation, and we weren’t prepared. So they just tossed us mechanics into the open, at the pile of broken Knightwalker armors, in hopes we’d fix enough of them before Spiders or Janissary or Musketeers decide to storm Queenstanding.

  The walkers were of two kinds: barely touched at all or damaged severely, depending on if the armor in question was hit by a gunpowder bomb. These were incredibly destructive — or rather, our Knightwalkers were extremely poorly defended against them. This was no surprise considering the fact we’d never fought Divine Kingdom, the only faction which was supposed to use gunpowder in the first place. The Kingdom was a faraway land, one of legends, not your everyday Clockworld reality.

  As I worked, I couldn’t help but notice our battle stations being manned and all kinds of interesting activity going on battlements: self-heating vats filled to the brim with fresh tar; ballista crews reloading and priming their huge machines; yeomen marching to and fro following the croak of their sergeant’s commands, and so on. We were preparing for a truly serious siege.

  Otherwise, the day was quite peaceful; the skies a flawless deep Albion blue, the air ripe with the smells of tea, cinnamon, and red peppers, with a tang of salt the gusts of eastern wind were bringing from the docks nearby. The atmosphere was quite relaxing actually, and I jumped up only once — when the alarm bell on our watchtower rang and a huge wound-up assembly drum started beating above the barracks.

  “Chill, it’s a drill,” Tranh said with a smile. Was he smiling because it was a common joke? Or was it the treacherous smile of an Asian traitor ready to stab me in the back? I couldn’t tell anymore, and, among all the unfamiliar little pieces this new Clockworld morning was composed of, this one was by far the worst.

  I merely nodded and got back to work. Together, we freed a new damaged walker out of the pile of discarded armor. This one was nearly intact, except for the shoulder joint on its crossbow arm which had blown up, and the crossbow itself was burned down to a pair of matchsticks.

  The joint part was easy; to build a new Knightwalker shoulder joint, you need one large self-wound spring and a couple medium simple ones to serve as backups. The “bones” of the joint will be the planks of iron, two pairs of them, and, finally, you need some steel string used as tendons.

  Crafting . . . Knightwalker Shoulder Joint

  Self-wound Spring, Large x1

  Spring, Medium x2

  Assorted Metal Planks, x4

  Steel Wire, x24

  It’s amazing how such a complex thing can be put together out of the most basic components once you have a blueprint. The blueprint itself, something I have on my Apprentice mechanic workbench and cannot carry away, is a very elegant thing, displaying a lot of physical and mechanical calculus to begin with, plus smart exploitation of the very essence of Clockworld, its simplified natural laws. I always wonder who invented the first Knightwalker — if it was a group of Grandmaster mechanics or merely a single one of them. We were supposed to have a couple Grandmasters around the place, but I’d never seen them.

  Now, we had to build a crossbow to replace the miserable burned-out thing still attached to the Knightwalker’s right wrist. This part was a bit more complex, as a walker’s crossbow is not your common Wakeworld crossbow in which you put a bolt manually then prime the string by pulling the hook back, and so on, and so on. A Knightwalker can’t really do any of these things, so its crossbow has to be a self-loading weapon, its fire slow but fully automatic, its trigger found inside the walker’s gauntlet. From what we presently had, only the trigger mechanism actually remained operational.

  So, besides this one, we needed two extra mechanisms: the firing mechanism and the loading mechanism.

  The firing mechanism of a walker’s crossbow is pretty simple: it employs two sturdy metal planks as guides, a piece of steel cable made out of three pieces of string to launch projectiles along them, and a piece of steel pipe to house a projectile while it’s at rest. We also need two small self-wound springs to keep the string neatly strung:

  Crafting . . . Walker’s Crossbow Firing Mechanism

  Assorted Metal Planks x2

  Steel String x3

  Self-wound Spring, Small x2

  Steel Pipe x1

  Next, the loading mechanism. This one is actually trickier: you want bolts to be copper and hefty (they also deform nicely and wrap themselves around any kinds of gears and levers in case you hit machinery instead of flesh). These bolts must be contained within a box of lighter metal (tin works quite fine) with guides within. The trick is these bolts must not scatter when the Knightwalker is hit or, instead, hits somebody or something with its crossbow arm.

  The easiest way to solve this, I found, is to drill a tiny groove in every bolt’s head, and one more back in its fletching area, and then use two strings of steel to make sort of a necklace of them. Then you use a medium sized self-wound spring to move the bolts along the necklace, and two simple small pre-wound springs to click them off putting them into the crossbow one by one.

  Crafting . . . Walker’s Crossbow Loading Mechanism

  Copper Spike x64

  Steel Pipe x64

  Tin Plate x25

  Steel String x2

  Self-wound Spring, Medium x1

  Spring, Small x2

  Now, on to crafting the complete crossbow, using the trigger mechanism we extracted from the Knightwalker’s gauntlet.

  Crafting . . . Walker’s Crossbow

  Walker’s Crossbow Firing Mechanism x1

  Walker’s Crossbow Loading Mechanism x1

  Walker’s Crossbow Trigger Mechanism x1

  This wasn’t the end of things, potentially. Instead of just mounting this basic crossbow back on the self-propelled armor, I could have played with arithmometers a little, crafted a Death Head to correct the aim, and so on. I could have used poison or flammable bolts for ammo, etc. I’d play with the armor and its weapon happily for the entire Clockworld day, and get paid a lot for it, if not for the sense of urgency hanging all around our fort. It just felt wrong, being too much of an inventor now. Everyone seemed to feel this — there were no jokes passed on around the mechanics’ place, no custom mechanical dogs running around meddling with people’s work, no nothing. Everyone was serious and resolute, and worked as if our time was running out.

  As indeed it was, which I learned when the alarm bell went off for the second time and the mechanical drum started to thump on top of the nearest watchtower, calling for all battle stations to be manned as soon as possible.

  “Chill . . . it’s a drill,” I muttered to Tranh without looking up from the crossbow I still had to build into the walker’s gauntlet.

  “No!” Tranh tapped my shoulder, his hand a nervous trembling starfish. “No, Ben, this is . . . how to say . . . truth, for real!”

  Still not believing him, I raised my head. Tranh hadn’t played me. A weird festive cloud blocked the sunlight just as I watched; an oblong elliptic form sporting a large hanging basket of a gondola. The gondola had tiny windows, a propeller, and an intricate fishlike fin, semi-transparent — a rudder, that is.

  An airship! I had time to think, and the next moment, the ship started raining Musketeers on our heads.

  They weren’t armed with muskets, thank the Clockworld gods for small favors — no gunpowder for La Republique. Their apparel could instantly be recognized though. Every Musketeer rappelling down from a rope wore this silken red cloak, streaming like a hundred of gauze ribbons behind them. Their capes
seemed absurd to me at first, purely decorative, until I saw the starting arrivals fight our yeomen on the battlements. Their fencing tricks made the very air whistle and sing. Their moves seemed like magic. Lightly armored — or hardly armored at all — Musketeers attacked our troops in a complex ballet, their many cloaks swirling around, shapeshifting.

  Our yeomen tried hard to nick at least a single Musketeer with their lances and swords and maces — and yet our swords and daggers, cutting madly through the gauze, always found empty air — while French rapiers, striking back, despawned or at least disabled their targets with ease, piercing one of their opponents’ weak spots lying exposed before their trained Musketeer eyes. The same happened with crossbow bolts fired. Those went clean through the red gauze, striking no one, and left the poor yeomen open for a deadly counter-blow.

  Our anti-siege weapons, all those primed tar canisters, all those ballistae and toppling cranes — all of them were useless against this rain of red phantoms, two thirds of them still descending from above on their ribbons of red, dropping down on, and on, and on, in unthinkable numbers. There was an entire maelstrom of airships circling above Queenstanding now, and we had no means to bring even a third of them down.

  “Frenchies!” someone shouted. “Are we fighting Frenchies now?”

  “They’re allies with Turks!” Someone else shouted back. “What did you expect, huh? It’s retaliation!”

  “To the armors! Man the Knightwalkers!”

  “Crossbowmen! Regroup!”

  “Fall back! Fall back!”

  And soon it was the usual mess of a battle, all over again, everyone running somewhere, bolts flying, red gauze swirling and rapiers stinging out of twirling ribbons, more and more of our troops, already decimated by yesterday’s raid, despawned without being able to strike back.

  Someone pushed past me and jumped into the armor I was working on, barely letting me finish mounting the gauntlet back on the walker. More and more Knightwalkers were joining the battle, and that was quite good, as the red capes of the invaders were about to overwhelm us.

  The walkers tore and burned their way through the gauze, peppering the attackers with bolts and tossing them around like angry windmills. In seconds, the tide was turning in our favor. In minutes, our boys were ruling the battlefield again.

  And this was when the stronghold’s gates burst open.

  It wasn’t a battering ram — I was pretty sure by now how a battering ram would look. No, it was this huge grey machine that stepped into the breach, a looming tetrapod of solid bluish-grey colored metal, with a few moving spiderlike limbs crowning it. It was these limbs that tore the gate down, and now, even as I watched, they kept picking up assorted debris — rocks and boulders, wooden carts, even live cows — and tossing them at our defenders with incredible momentum, always a nice hit making debris and bodies fly.

  This thing wasn’t French.

  “It’s Germans!” Tranh shouted into my ear. “Teutons are here, they’re allies with French!”

  I really hoped he was wrong, and yet it seemed to be close enough to truth. We’d never seen Germans in combat, but the stories of their mechanical genius circulated around Albion all the time. And now we could witness their work firsthand, and what a walking horror it was! A single Teutonic machine, a siege device combined with an assault unit, made its way through the courtyard raining destruction and death upon us.

  I saw with my own eyes how it picked up a Knightwalker caught in its way — as easy as a kitten — and tossed the walking armor high up into the air. The walker crashed into the bell tower, and the alarm bell went quiet, then boomed as it crashed, boulders and debris raining down.

  The Knightwalker dropped to the ground right next to us and it never got up, its pilot dead and despawned. A few yeomen still holding the upper ground tried to drop a vat of burning tar on top of the German machine. The big falling thing was intercepted by two of the three moving limbs and launched back, not as something chaotic but as a smart projectile, with mathematical precision, right at the attackers. Green flames whooshed and screams followed. And no one seemed to remain alive up there, or at least no one dared to harass the advancing machine anymore. Pools of burning tar were now splashed everywhere, and whatever around us could burn, it all caught on fire here and there, producing clouds of suffocating smoke. This smoke rose up in many columns of different shades and smells, from white to black. It mixed as it rose, and hid the entire scene from us, rather mercifully.

  And yet, I saw a possibility.

  “Could you get a couple of yeomen to bring me some tar from over there?” I asked Tranh. He nodded and departed. This is what I like about Asians: they don’t start arguments and ask no questions, they just act, and they’re absolutely reliable. Unless he was a spy for the Kingdom and all of this was make-believe, of course.

  The trick was, I needed another canister of tar, but it had to be fragile. And it had to ignite when broken. So I needed to build a tar canister out of tin, reinforce it with steel wire (or it would pop right when filled it with tar to the brim) and then attach a simple igniter to that wire, that way it would go off right when my canister was broken.

  First I crafted the canister.

  Crafting . . . Tar Canister, Tin

  Tin Sheet x12

  Steel String x64

  It took quite a lot of string in the end, because the structure had to be reliable enough, so I spent around two precious minutes building the tin vessel alone. In the end, it looked great though: impossible to tell from the real thing, as if made entirely of steel, the canister was a perfect ruse. At least, the yeomen Tranh brought back with him were misled by its appearance.

  “Fill this thing,” I told them, pointing at their jugs of tar.

  “What for?” they started to object. “Hey, we just emptied exactly the same thing, then were asked to bring the tar here, and that thing, let me tell you, kiddo, was up high and still could be dropped down on something — it was useful, see?”

  “It’s a magic trick!” I retorted. “Do it! I still need to craft the igniter.”

  This required some thinking, as I didn’t have anything able to set things on fire at hand: the Albion troops rarely use fire in combat. Illegal fights in the Pit sometimes divert from this tendency — well, in the Pit, mechanics would use every known unexpected trick to win.

  The safest way would be to dismantle one of the gas lanterns found all around the city. The problem was, all of them were up high, and I didn’t have any resources to get them. This meant I had to use some real ingenuity.

  Which I did. A small self-wound spring to propel a few nuts and bolts — grinding two pieces of flint together. The flint was, luckily, found underfoot in great profusion, along with granite, basalt, brickwork, and many other shards of broken architecture. While Tranh and the yeomen he brought were busy filling the new canister with tar, I invented and crafted the igniter.

  Crafting . . . Flintlock Igniter

  Nuts & Bolts x6

  Self-wound Spring, Small, x1

  Flint Shard, Small, x2

  My igniter was ready in less than a second, and I combined it with the tar canister to make something I called a . . . Tar Canister, just in case the Germans decide to look up the name before they pick this thing up.

  Crafting . . . Tar Canister

  Tar Canister, Tin x1

  Flintlock Igniter x1

  “Quickly, put it on the cart!” I yelled at Tranh and the yeomen. Tranh was the first one to grab the Canister. The yeomen, less used to taking orders without asking questions, hesitated for a moment, yet then joined in. In less than ten seconds, we had the fake canister firmly placed on a small wooden platform on wheels — one of many carts used by Fusiliers for transportation of Knightwalkers and heavy-duty equipment.

  The three yeomen grunted, but pushed this cart loaded with the full canister some thirty feet forward, to the spot I pointed out to them, and they did it right on time, too —
as the Teutonic machine showed itself out of the smoke right the next moment. It was closing in on us, and oh my, what a huge steel behemoth it was! Before its pilot had a chance to notice our small party, one of its upper limbs grabbed a boulder and tossed it our way, with such demonic precision we barely had time to duck, and one of the two yeomen was pulverized on the spot.

  “Most likely arithmometer-guided,” Tranh observed remotely.

  “Push!” I shouted, trying not to think what would happen if my plan failed to work. “Push, push, push!”

  The cart rolled forward, urged on by our unified effort, the tar sloshing heavily inside. As the advancing Teutonic machine grabbed another boulder, preparing to hurl it at us, we dropped the cart and scattered, hiding the best we could. Our push was enough, however, and the cart reached the German machine, even thumped against its lower limb as it stopped. The big shiny canister full of tar — arithmometer-driven or not, this fat projectile was far too attractive for the machine limbs to ignore.

  “It’s gonna pick it up!” I heard excited mutterings from a cover nearby. “It’s gonna pick it up!”

  And it did. The machine’s upper limb grabbed the big canister as easily as a coconut . . . and crushed it with all the strength reserved for a steel drum, which of course it wasn’t. The tin container popped in an instant, the loosened strings triggering my flintlock igniter right as the tar was pouring down in many black streams, drenching the walking behemoth all over. Then — WHOOSH! — and the whole machine caught on fire at once.

  And what a sight it was! The thing thrashed around in agony and even seemed to scream — though I knew it were merely its arithmometer-driven limbs grinding against each other, metal screaming against metal in many attempts to solve the heat problem, something they couldn’t. It was pretty clear the crew was fried within a few seconds. The thing resembled a pressure cooker to begin with, and became one as soon as we heated it from the outside. And we were in Clockworld, not NYC.