“The letter asks Cornelius to take a sea voyage. But the clue to find the ship makes no sense. Then there is the tea. Also, his mother was a spy.” Johann rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “I think this is code. I think this is not the message.”
Valentin appeared to be warring between disdain and intrigue. “A spy code? You use every third word, yes?”
Johann tried variations on skipped words, but nothing made sense. “I want to try the tea.”
“Tea is disgusting.” Cornelius slid free of Valentin and curled like a cat against Johann’s side. “Darling, have a drink with me.” He ran a finger down Johann’s nose. “Not tea.”
Johann willed himself to resist, but flirty Cornelius was almost as intoxicating as absinthe. “We must reach the docks by ten, or they will leave us.”
“I don’t want to leave Calais.” Cornelius pressed an openmouthed kiss on the exposed skin at Johann’s neck. “I want to take you home and make love to you.”
He sucked lightly at Johann’s neck, and Johann gripped his hair, though he couldn’t seem to bring himself to pull Cornelius away.
Valentin crossed his arms over his chest. “Where is your peg leg?”
It was difficult to form his reply in French as Cornelius made love to his neck while re-unbuttoning his shirt and sliding a hand into the back of his trousers. “It…is clockwork.”
“He gave you a clockwork leg?” This seemed to upset Valentin more than anything else. He glowered harder.
The barmaid returned with the tea, setting it on the table near them. “Here you are, sir.”
Johann extricated himself from Cornelius as best he could and lifted the lid on the pot. It seemed steeped enough, though he wondered if he shouldn’t let it go a bit longer, in case. But as he set the lid back on, Cornelius slipped a finger between his nether cheeks, and when Johann yelped and startled, he spilled the tea all over the letter, which he’d laid on the table.
As the liquid sloshed in thick droplets across the paper, most of the words faded, but a few of them remained.
Buzzing with triumph, Johann picked up the teapot and poured it liberally all over the letter. He hadn’t even placed the pot back down before the old letter had vanished and a new one entirely remained.
Dearest Cornelius,
Danger, this letter is false. Hide yourself and tell no one where you are, not even friends. Do not trust your father. Stay away from France and England at all cost until the war is over. Pray God that day comes soon. I love you always, my darling tinker boy, and hope to see you again soon.
Thinking of you always, Mama
Valentin squinted helplessly at it. “What does it say?”
Before Johann could attempt to translate, Cornelius, abruptly sober, swiped the letter from the table and stared at it intently. Lowering it, he stared first at Johann, then at Valentin, his pain acute even through the haze of his inebriation. “I must leave Calais. Not by the sea ships. Those men mean to kidnap me. They forced my mother to write the first note, and she hid this one inside.” He stared again at the letter, looking as if a new wound pierced deep. “She says I’m not to trust my father.”
Valentin paled. “You cannot leave. Wherever would you go?”
“I have a ship waiting,” Johann reminded them. “We must leave now and go to the pirate docks.”
“You think you get to take him to safety?” Valentin puffed up, indignant. “I am his oldest friend. I will keep him safe.”
Johann clenched his jaw, hating Valentin, despising having to fight through French to express himself. “My ship is good. Many men will fight to keep him safe.” He switched to English to soothe Cornelius. “They are eager to have a tinker. They’ll give you anything you ask for. They’ll pay you to come aboard. And as a member of the crew, they would protect you against any attackers.” Unless they decide to leave you dying on the docks for the army to find.
But Johann would be there to ensure that didn’t happen, not this time.
“Stop speaking English!” Valentin shouted.
Then everyone began shouting, and screaming, as five large, angry men burst into the tavern.
Johann pulled Cornelius beneath the table as he surveyed the scene with both a soldier and a pirate’s gaze. He flipped up his patch so he could use his clockwork eye, which let him see so much better in the dark. Not five but eight men, all of them large and angry, wearing uniforms. They were searching for something.
For someone. They were searching, he knew in his bones, for Cornelius.
“We must go. Now.” He scooped up the letter, stuffing it into his waistcoat before collecting Cornelius’s heavy satchel from the floor. His very heavy satchel.
Valentin crouched beside them too, uncertain. “We don’t know they’re here for Cornelius.”
As if they heard the name, which possibly they had, one of the men locked his gaze on Cornelius, pointed and shouted again. In German—but it was not good German. It was German, in fact, as bad as Johann’s French. As the men moved into better light, Johann saw they were Austrian uniforms. Except the insignia was all wrong, and several crucial bits of dress were missing.
This situation, he realized, was bad, and it was about to get much, much worse.
Johann pushed Cornelius and the bag into Valentin’s arms. “Take him out of here. Head to Hangman’s Landing. Do you know it?”
“Yes, but—I can’t fight these men!”
“I can.” Johann rose, gaze fixed on the approaching faux-soldiers as he mapped out several different ways to fight them in his head. “Go. I will keep them away and come after.”
He shoved them out of the booth and toward the rear of the tavern, then placed himself squarely between the attackers and his lover.
The leader shouted out garbled German, which probably sounded threatening to the room but came out clearly as wet breakfast to Johann.
He smiled a mirthless smile. “Breakfast is better warm and dry. You will never have him, and I will kill every man who tries.”
After swiping the pistol from the man’s belt beside him, he cocked it, aimed and shot the leader in the center of his chest.
In the chaos, he ran, but not directly for the back door. He took a long, winding route, overturning tables and chairs along the way, at one point stumbling onto a pot of oil, which he tossed on a table. After stealing a man’s lit cigarette from his mouth, Johann threw it into the oil, which erupted in a fine blaze. This finished the job of sending the tavern fully into an uproar, and as he slipped along the wall toward the kitchen, Johann heard the frustrated shouts in bad German morphing occasionally into French as he made his way out of the tavern.
To his shock, however, as he exited, he saw Cornelius and Valentin hovering in a corner of the back room, not fleeing at all.
“He wouldn’t leave you.” Valentin’s tone was both humble and frustrated.
Swearing in German, Johann grabbed them both and dragged them into the inn yard. They had mere seconds to escape before the men sought them here. Spying a horse loose in the chaos, he caught it and nodded to Valentin.
“Get on.” He held out his good hand as a step. Valentin went, and Johann settled the satchel behind him. But when Johann tried to boost up Cornelius, he wouldn’t go.
“I won’t leave without you.”
“Conny,” Valentin cried in despair.
Familiar shouts spurred Johann into action. “Hangman’s Landing. Go, now,” he told Valentin, and slapped the horse hard on the rump.
Then he picked up Cornelius, swung him around to his back and started to run.
He was a little unsteady at first, with his clockwork legs and the redistributed weight, but he adapted much quicker than he thought he would. Except for the extra strain on his human arm and his legs settling harder into the clockwork, carrying Cornelius didn’t affect him at all. In fact, he found himself surpri
sed at how fast he was moving. When he realized he’d just passed a carriage with horses trotting at a decent clip, he nearly stumbled in surprise.
“It’s your legs,” Cornelius said into his ear. “Clockwork works better than flesh and bone.”
“But I’m not even the slightest bit winded. I’ve run over a half kilo at top speed, up and down hills and with extra weight on my back.”
Cornelius clutched him tighter. “This might be the time to explain that you have more clockwork than simply your arm and legs and eye.”
Johann slowed so he could glance over his shoulder at Cornelius. “What else is mechanical?”
“Some cogs and bellows to help a punctured lung. A bit of internal machinery that helps keep your metal limbs in better harmony with your flesh.” He nuzzled Johann’s ear sadly. “And…you have a clockwork heart. But you must never tell anyone about that.”
The anxiety in Cornelius’s tone made a shiver run down Johann’s spine, one that resonated even more than the shock at finding out how mechanical he truly was. “Wh-why?”
“Because your heart is the weapon your army was trying to destroy. The one I think my father is trying to steal.”
The world spun around Johann. He fought to make it stay right. “But…why did you save me at all?” Why did you put a weapon inside me?
“You were dying. I didn’t want you to.”
“Why not? You didn’t know me.”
“I don’t know. Only that I couldn’t bear to watch you die when I knew I could save you.”
A thousand questions and fears rattled inside Johann. But he realized, no, he didn’t feel any of this in his heart. A tightness in his chest, his throat—but as it had since he’d woken in Cornelius’s bed, the left of center portion of his chest felt numb and strange. He’d thought the scar was Cornelius removing shrapnel, but now he knew better. If he concentrated, he could feel it pumping without fail, a powerful machine.
A weapon.
“Will it explode?”
“No.” Cornelius brushed a kiss on his neck. “It is only a heart. An engine. But it will do whatever you ask of it. You may run as fast and hard as your legs can take you. It will power your every step without fail. And the bellows in your lung will give you all the air you require.”
I am a monster. A terrible machine. “Can—can I die?”
“Oh yes. If your clockwork heart ceases to beat, you will live no more.”
The world kept spinning, but Johann would not let anything keep him from taking Cornelius to safety. He wasn’t sure yet what he thought of Cornelius’s meddling, but this was not the moment for dramatics. They had to get to the Farthing. Once aboard, dramatics would be entirely appropriate, in many varied ways.
Show me what you can do, my monster heart.
He ran. His goal was more than simple escape now—he wanted to see what he could do. How fast? How hard? How far? The answer, it seemed, was as Cornelius said—as fast as he wanted. It was his legs that showed him the wall of limitation. But of course, so little of his legs were his legs. The span of his capability was rather impressively high.
This was amazing. This was a miracle. He was a monster, yes, but he was a monster who could move so fast, he felt any second he might begin to fly.
A warmth in his chest made him glance down—and slow. “Cornelius, something is wrong.” There in the place where his heart was, a soft red glow emanated.
Cornelius pulled off Johann’s hat and clapped it over the glow. “It’s only a heat exchange. I have it in a casing. You’ll be fine. But I’ll keep it hidden.”
He did, but Johann couldn’t lose his sense of that heat, that bright red beacon burning inside him.
They moved so quickly, they arrived at the docks moments before Valentin on his horse.
“How—how did you do this?” Valentin slid off as Cornelius did, eyes wide. He pointed at Johann. “You ran! I came straight here, on a clear road, the fastest way, and I did not see you—”
Johann, not even a little bit winded, grabbed Valentin’s shoulder with his clockwork hand and Cornelius with his right. “Come. We have no time to waste. Bring the satchel.”
“But—where are we going? Why—?”
“Berger, what the blazes are you doing?” Crawley swung down from the Farthing, wearing a jaunty hat, a finer coat than he’d worn before and an outraged expression. “We said nothing of three passengers. Certainly there was no talk of a simpering French dandy.”
Johann held up a hand at Crawley and turned to Valentin. “We must leave now. Will you go, or stay?”
“For fuck’s sake,” Crawley murmured.
Valentin’s gaze darted between Crawley, Cornelius and Johann like a rabbit’s. “I won’t leave Cornelius.”
Johann turned back to Crawley. “It is three. And we must leave immediately.”
“It will not be three. I don’t care how good this tinker is—”
Cornelius stepped in front of Johann, holding tight to his hand. “I am the best in France, save Félix Dubois,” he said in almost perfect English.
Crawley paused. “That’s quite a boast.”
Johann saw a crack in the captain’s resolve and pressed his advantage. “He is Dubois’s apprentice.”
Crawley said nothing.
Shouts from the cliff above the pier told Johann their pursuers had found them. There was no more time for finessing, only barging through. “We must leave now. Now.”
“Three years,” Crawley said, still staring at Cornelius.
Johann’s clockwork heart beat as regularly as it ever did, but that tightness in the center of his chest became acute. “No.”
“Three years’ contract for the tinker.” Crawley’s tone was impassive and implacable. “That’s the price for taking the three of you on.”
Johann had never wanted to punch Crawley more, and he’d wanted to hit him very hard, many times. “I won’t leave him with you.”
“Then you may have a contract too.” He cast a look of disdain at Valentin. “Not for the French weasel, however. He may ride only until he annoys me.”
“Three years’ contract for all three of us, and we have a deal,” Cornelius said, extending his hand.
Johann pushed it down. “You don’t know what you’re agreeing to.”
“Yes, I do.” Now it was Cornelius who met Crawley’s gaze without blinking. “We agree to stay on this ship for three years, under his command and his protection. For a wage. Mine will be four times whatever he has previously paid a tinker.”
Crawley made a strangled noise, but Valentin outright yelped. “Ils arrivent! Ils arrivent!”
The men ran down the hill toward the pier, shouting and aiming their pistols. Swearing, Crawley shoved them toward the ship and called out to the ships—rats ashore, mates, rats ashore!—at which point every ship in the bay erupted with men and women, shouting and waving blades while others went about loading cannons.
Crawley hoisted them up the ladder one by one—first Valentin, then Cornelius, then Johann, following them up himself. As soon as Crawley’s boot touched the rope, The Brass Farthing’s aether heaved, billowing bright into the dirigible’s balloon, firing the propellers as the first mate unhooked the mooring and they cast away.
Chapter Seven
Sobriety came to Cornelius in dark, painful rushes—when he fled the tavern, when he realized Valentin meant to take him away from Johann, when he had to explain to Johann about his clockwork heart. When it was clear his choice was between death or indenture. Sadly, sobriety didn’t feel swinging from a rope ladder on an airship rising into the night sky was a moment when clarity should descend. Or perhaps it was more that he could force a bit of sharpness to his mouth and mind, but too much alcohol in the blood would never make his fingers work properly.
Johann helped him, murmuring gentle words of encouragement in En
glish and sometimes German as he moved Cornelius’s hands up the ladder and used his knees as braces for Cornelius’s fumbling feet. It was a noble effort, especially as Cornelius could tell Johann had significant trouble getting his mechanical feet into the rungs, but they managed, and by achingly marginal inches, they made their way onto the ship. When they came close enough to the edge, hands hoisted Cornelius into the gondola.
“Non,” Conny cried when they reached for Johann. “Not his left arm.” He batted them away, his absinthe-soaked imagination all too able to visualize Johann and his separated appendage spiraling down into the water below. When Johann came close enough, Conny stabilized him above his left elbow as Johann hoisted himself aboard.
The English captain came up swiftly after, grumbling about inept, drunken landlubbers and stinking Frenchmen.
Cornelius swayed on his feet until Johann caught him up, murmuring reassurances into his ear, and Cornelius drank them in as he looked around the room. This was a gondola different than any he’d been in before, almost more as if a wooden ship had been grafted onto a balloon—which sometimes was exactly how privateer ships were built. They stood in the rear, in the enclosed portion of the carriage, with a mess and officer’s cabin on one side, the grand captain’s cabin on the other. A small storage area was visible on the right, probably for weapons, but then the wall of glass gave way to a small open deck, where two figures rushed about and another manned the wheel below the balloon. A second wheel was inside the glass-enclosed gondola, beside a narrow stair leading to the hold below. None of it was overly impressive.
“Who is this other one? I thought there were only meant to be two.” This came from a man who appeared to be from a northern Asian country, most likely China by Conny’s guess. He didn’t look pleased to have new arrivals, and neither did the two women standing with arms folded beside him.
Like the captain, they were decked in leather armor and buckles greatly excessive beyond practical use, though the Asian man had a more Eastern flair to his style. The women continued in the theme of airship pirate decoration, but they were hugely distinct in their presentation. One woman, taller and darker of complexion, had cropped her hair shorter than most men and wore piercings in both ears, her nose and an eyebrow. Tattoos covered every available surface of her exposed skin below her neck, and her clothing was highly masculine. The other woman wore trousers as well, but her hair was longer, braided and tucked to one side. She’d gone out of her way to look feminine and slightly pretty whereas her companion used everything about her to telegraph aggression and rejection of the feminine ideal.
Clockwork Heart: Clockwork Love, Book 1 Page 9