The Giant's Seat

by Dave Butler

  “It’s not sharks. This is a lake. Sharks don’t live in lakes.” Charlie considered. “I’ll take a look and then I’ll come right back.”

  “Yeah.” Ollie hefted a short length of heavy wood. “You come right back, or we come in after you.”

  “You can’t swim, mate,” Bob told her friend.

  “I don’t have to swim. I just have to sink and be able to hit with this club.”

  Lloyd scratched his chin and looked thoughtful.

  The chimney sweeps’ bluster made Charlie feel good. “Wait right here.”

  He handed the dowsing rod to Lloyd Shankin and waded into the lake.

  The water was cold, though it was summertime. The lake must have been fed by the melting ice packs on Cader Idris.

  Three steps in and the ground disappeared beneath Charlie’s feet—he sank.

  Charlie tried to kick, which did no good—he was too heavy to swim—and he stared up. Through the lake’s surface all he could see was a shaking silvery band that was the stars, rippled by the water, and shadows where his four friends stood. As he fell, a stray root caught at his ankle and threatened to turn him upside down. He wobbled, bumped his knuckles against the steep slope, and nearly pitched over.

  But he kept his head, and after a few seconds he turned to examine the lake beneath the surface of the water.

  There were no sharks.

  Instead there was a glass dome. The monument in the center of the lake, he saw, didn’t rest on an island, but on the height of the dome. It stood like the cross on the cupola of a church, or the weather vane on the peak of a house.

  The dome was built of curved panes fitted into iron frames and sunk at their base into the floor of the lake. The panes were taller than Charlie and almost as wide. The floor, Charlie now saw, was not a natural lake bottom covered with sediment and weeds, but was paved with large slabs of stone. The lake was artificial. It was a stone bowl, steep-walled and filled with water, the purpose of which seemed to be to hide this dome.

  From one side of the dome, a tunnel of glass extended and connected into the wall of the lake. The passageway was peaked, with a curve to its surface that reminded Charlie of minarets he’d seen in books. It ran in the direction of the Plas Machynlleth—if a person in the palace basement knew which door to open, he could probably walk right through the tunnel and into the dome.

  Opposite the glass tunnel, a steel box the size of Pondicherry’s Clockwork Invention & Repair clung to the side of the dome. It reminded Charlie of a steel carriage house attached to the side of a glass house.

  Beyond the structure lay dark space—Charlie stared, and he thought he saw the opening of a cavern in the wall of the lake.

  There were people inside the dome, and one of them looked like Thomas.

  Charlie plodded forward. He wished he could swim—swimming was fast. Instead he walked, and the water resisted, and he worried he might not have enough power to rescue Thomas when he finally got to him.

  Inside the dome, light came from six globes sparking with blue fire atop tall brass poles. Similar glowing spheres hung on thick cables running along the minaret-arched ceiling of the tunnel.

  Charlie crept up to the base of the dome.

  He could see into the steel box now. There was a pool of water, and it ran right up to the far wall, and in the water floated a vessel. The steel box wasn’t a carriage house—it was a boathouse! The vessel looked like a canal boat—long and thin and pointed. Only this canal boat didn’t seem to have windows; it was made of steel, and it had a large circular blade attached to the hind end.

  But how could the canal boat go anywhere? The pool didn’t have any visible exits.

  Three men Charlie knew stood in the center of the dome: the heavyset speculator William T. Bowen, wearing a green frock coat; the Frenchman Gaston St. Jacques, in his long black cape; and the kobold Heinrich Zahnkrieger, wearing a waistcoat and rolled shirtsleeves such as Charlie had seen him wear many days in Pondicherry’s Clockwork Invention & Repair. It didn’t surprise Charlie to see the Iron Cog’s men down under the lake, but he did stumble backward for fear of being seen…until he realized that the lights inside the dome probably meant he could see in but the Cog’s men couldn’t see out.

  What hurt him—what felt as if a nail the length of his forearm had been driven through his chest—was the sight of Thomas.

  Thomas was unmoving. He held still, frozen, immobile. He might as well have been a statue. And he was being carried by two men into the steel box.

  A flicker of movement inside the dome caught Charlie’s eye. The tiling of the dome’s floor was interrupted by a band of glass running across the middle. Something was moving under the glass.

  As it moved, it churned the water and generated a cloud of sand and dirt, but Charlie saw flashes of metal and teeth. He wasn’t sure whether he was seeing the champing teeth of a huge mouth or the threshing teeth of a gear wheel.

  Or both.

  Whatever the thing was, it was emerging from under the glass dome into the lake.

  Charlie heard a whine behind him. He grabbed the iron frame of the pane in front of him and turned himself around—

  BANG!

  Something slammed into him. Because he was turning, Charlie caught the blow at an angle. Instead of being pinned against the dome, he bounced and skidded up it.

  His chest hurt where he’d been hit.

  Charlie looked at what had hit him and almost froze.

  It looked like an enormous wild boar. A huge gearwheel circled on each side of its small body, driving its motion. Two long spikes protruded from the front of the device like tusks, and two arms with pincer hands sprouted from its top. India rubber tyres dragged it around the ground, but they were in a strange pattern, four to a side, with the front and rear tyres raised. Charlie wondered why the tyres were arranged so oddly, until the machine charged the dome—

  and the front tyres dragged it neatly up onto the glass and straight at Charlie.

  Charlie jumped.

  He couldn’t swim, but with the strength of his legs he could kick away from the surface of the dome, and he did, slowly somersaulting through the water. The charging device whined as it turned after him again.

  Charlie landed—

  and a second machine lanced him in the side.

  Charlie fell, and the eight heavy tyres of the second machine ground over him like stampeding cattle. He cried out, felt his chest fill with water.

  He clapped a hand to his side. The fabric of his skin had torn. So had the metal underneath. Charlie felt a whir of cogs within himself.

  The machine growled and reversed direction to run over Charlie again.

  Charlie rolled, reached up—

  and dug his fingers into the axle connecting two of the wheels. He picked himself off the floor, hugging the underside of the machine, and found he was being carried along for the ride.

  Toward the dome.

  He looked past his feet and saw Thomas being loaded into the canal boat.

  And a wall, a sheet of steel, was slowly dropping from the ceiling where the box and the dome joined. The steel box, with its pool and its vessel and Thomas inside, was being sealed off from the dome and from Charlie.

  The machine groaned in complaint and reversed direction again.

  The first machine rumbled past. Its pincer hands scratched at the stone about it, churning up more dirt and sand and obscuring Charlie’s view of Thomas.

  The machines couldn’t find Charlie. Even the one he was clinging to didn’t realize he was there.

  He waited until he had a clear line of sight, then straightened his arms, extending himself as far from the dome as he could—

  and snapped himself forward, feetfirst, like a rocket.

  His aim wasn’t perfect. His heels and back banged along on the stone, and it was a good thing it was smooth slate. He skipped, and eventually his trajectory turned into a bouncing roll, but when he came to rest, Charlie was leaning against the glass dome. />
  The boar stopped and turned toward him. Charlie didn’t see eyes, but with the spikes coming out of the end of each machine, he felt as if two wild animals were staring at him and pawing the earth. He had come into the thicket as a hunter, but the animals had cornered him.

  The boars charged.

  Charlie scrambled to his feet and lunged sideways.

  His legs didn’t push him fast enough through the water, so he grabbed the frame of the dome with both hands and pulled. Charlie rocketed forward, rushing as fast as he could toward the hole he knew had to be there.

  He heard the rumble and rattle grow louder behind him as the boars gave chase.

  And there it was.

  The hole the boars must have come out of.

  The hole opening into a tunnel underneath the dome, under the band of glass in the dome’s floor.

  The dome’s frame created an iron lintel running over the top of the tunnel. Grabbing it, Charlie dragged himself into the tunnel.

  He bent at the waist and yanked his feet up after him—

  KA-CHANG!

  The nearer of the two boars rammed against the tunnel opening. It was too big to fit into the passage coming at it from an oblique angle, so it jammed its tusks in, narrowly missed Charlie, and ground at the floor with all its tyres.

  Charlie ignored it and dragged himself onward.

  There had to be a way up. A hatch. For maintenance, or to lower a boar from the dome down into the tunnel.

  But he didn’t see one.

  Behind him, he heard grinding and clawing as the boar repositioned itself. Then, with a whine, it charged him.

  He risked a glance in its direction. The boar almost entirely filled the tunnel, and as it raced toward Charlie, it held its pincer hands low on the ground.

  There was no room to go over or under. Charlie would be trampled, grabbed, or impaled.

  Then he heard a whine from the other direction. Feeling a heavy sinking in his chest, Charlie looked, and he saw that the tunnel opened into the lake at the opposite end, too—

  and that that exit was now blocked by the second boar, also charging in his direction.

  There had to be a hatch. There just had to be.

  Charlie dragged himself as fast as he could with both arms and kicked with both legs.

  The boars came closer.

  There had to be a hatch.

  Only there wasn’t.

  The growling and whining of the boars was so loud Charlie could barely think.

  He stopped, stood, braced his feet against the floor and his shoulders against the glass and then hurled himself up.

  The glass didn’t shatter—

  but, as Charlie pushed, a long plate of it bumped up and slid aside.

  Charlie dragged himself out of the water.

  With a muffled thud, the boars collided. Water sloshed up out of the hole, but Charlie didn’t wait to see what happened to the machines that had been trying to destroy him.

  The steel wall sliding down from the ceiling was only a few feet from the floor. Thomas was on the other side.

  Charlie tumbled to his feet and ran.

  Charlie threw himself onto his belly and slid.

  It hurt. The skin of his chest felt as if it were being scraped right off, and his shoulder caught on a lip of upraised slate, turning his slide into a violent tumble that sent him rolling headfirst into the metal box.

  WHAM!

  The steel wall slammed down behind him, shutting him in.

  Charlie staggered to his feet. Water poured from the hole in his side. He coughed and spat water up from his lungs. But he didn’t stop his ragged run.

  The thing he’d been thinking of as a canal boat was airtight, top and bottom, and made of sheets of metal riveted together. Closer up, it looked more like a cigar than a canal boat.

  The strange craft bobbed in a long pool, and as Charlie rushed toward it, the Frenchman Gaston St. Jacques stepped into a hatch on top of the vessel.

  In his mind’s eye, Charlie saw the same Gaston St. Jacques, just a few days earlier, hurling Charlie’s bap to his death out of a leisure-wheel carriage.

  Charlie erupted into a sprint. The Frenchman was gripping the hatch cover and about to shut it behind him when Charlie’s foot hit the top of the boat.

  St. Jacques looked up. His mustachioed face twisted into the same disdainful curl Charlie had seen when the man had murdered his bap.

  “Bowen!” The Frenchman pulled a pistol from his belt.

  Charlie ran faster. As he pushed his gears to extend themselves beyond their ordinary range, he felt his insides warm and tremble—and he saw St. Jacques’s sneer evaporate.

  Before the Frenchman could bring the pistol up to bear, Charlie slammed into him. Gaston St. Jacques grunted as he tumbled backward. Charlie pounded him to the boat’s deck, knocking all the air from the man’s lungs.

  Then he noticed the burbling sound.

  Charlie looked up. A second steel wall, this one on the opposite side of the chamber, began to rise. The floor surrounding the boat’s pool was already submerged, and as the wall rose, air bubbled out of the room and water flooded in.

  Charlie looked back down at the vessel he was standing on. It was airtight, and the blade at the back was a propeller.

  The craft was built to travel underwater. It was a submarine vessel.

  Bob would have been fascinated.

  BONG!

  Something struck Charlie in the back of the head.

  Bells. Maybe it was because of the blow to his head, but Charlie could have sworn he heard bells ringing, over and over. They sounded like church bells. And they seemed to surround him.

  He fell forward. His head butted Gaston St. Jacques in the belly, and Charlie felt a moment of satisfaction to hear the man lose all the air in his torso again. Then Charlie bounced off the Frenchman, slipped, and fell into the water.

  He hit the slates beneath the submarine boat and scrambled to his feet. The vessel was rising steadily and was now beyond his fingertips.

  Charlie crouched, aimed, and jumped.

  Whoosh!

  He hurtled out of the water so fast he cleared the submarine boat’s deck and launched a few feet into the air.

  William T. Bowen turned to stare, a length of lead pipe in his hand, so Charlie crashed down on top of him. Bowen dropped the pipe into the water and tumbled in after it.

  Charlie climbed to his feet—

  and found himself looking down the open barrel of St. Jacques’s gun.

  “Help! Help!” William T. Bowen thrashed in the water, keeping his head from being submerged, but only barely.

  The ceiling was only a few feet over St. Jacques’s head and getting closer.

  “Again?” The Frenchman sighed. He pulled back the hammer of his pistol with a loud click.

  Then he fell sideways.

  Charlie looked down to see four arms emerging from the water and grabbing Gaston St. Jacques by both his ankles.

  Heaven-Bound Bob surged out of the water. With one hand she pulled herself up, and with the other she yanked one of the Frenchman’s feet left. Ollie, meanwhile, dragged St. Jacques’s other leg in the opposite direction.

  Bang!

  The gun went off, but missed.

  Bob and Ollie heaved, and Gaston St. Jacques yelled. Then the Frenchman did the splits and somersaulted backward off the deck of the ship—

  “No!” Bowen cried in the water below—

  St. Jacques crashed on top of him.

  Ollie shifted immediately into his snake form and came aboard. Charlie grabbed Bob by the forearm and yanked her up. Behind Bob, singing, was the dewin Lloyd Shankin. Charlie seized the Welshman’s high black collar and dragged him up, too. He still held the metal dowsing rod with the scarf wrapped around it.

  None of Charlie’s friends were out of breath, even though they must have dived to get to the bottom of the lake.

  Bowen and St. Jacques were in the water, but he had no time to think about them. He
didn’t even have time to talk—he shoved Bob and Lloyd down the hatch. Ollie slithered in along with them, and then Charlie dropped in after. He found himself standing in a short vertical shaft, pressed shoulder to shoulder against Bob. At the bottom, a horizontal passage stretched through the ship. Glass bulbs set into the walls and containing tiny humanoid figures, just like those within Bowen’s steam-truck, gave light.

  The hatch cover scraped the top of the steel box.

  Bob kept her head. She grabbed the cover and yanked it shut, elbowing Charlie aside in the process. The inside of the hatch had a latching mechanism shaped like a ship’s wheel; Bob spun it tight with quick and confident motions.

  Bamf! Ollie the boy appeared in the horizontal passage. In the closed space, the rotten-egg smell was worse than usual.

  “Like you been a sailor in this getup for years,” Ollie said.

  “Me an’ machines.” Bob shrugged. “Natural friends, I guess.”

  “Where’s Gnat?” Charlie squeezed past Ollie and started down the passage. It was narrow for Lloyd, but for Charlie and the two chimney sweeps the hallway was wide enough to be comfortable. There were tanks and levers set into the walls of the passage, all of them labeled and most of them attached to gauges. Charlie didn’t take the time to look closely.

  “I came after you,” Ollie said, “once I saw those metal things trying to grind you up. Bob jumped in after me.”

  “I didn’t see ’er,” Bob added. “I reckon she’s up on the shore, ain’t she?”

  “You couldn’t have cut that any closer,” Charlie said. It wasn’t a complaint.

  Lloyd Shankin grinned. He looked huge in the tight space. “It was the Drowned Hundred that got us here.”

  “You sang an englyn?” Charlie asked. “A song about the Drowned Hundred let you come down?”

  “No hero should have to fight alone.” Lloyd nodded. “So I brought you your folk!”

  “But not Gnat?” Charlie did worry about her.

  Lloyd Shankin said, “I cast the spell on her, too. Maybe she just didn’t follow us.”

  “I breathed water like it was air,” Ollie said.

  “It wasn’t swimming, Charlie!” Bob laughed. “It was…running in water, an’ you got reason to know I ain’t much of a swimmer.”