by Sean Wallace
The boy twisted about, screaming, “Left!” and, without thinking, Lasher leaned left as he ran. A vicious tendril of barbed spider-wire shot past him, slamming into the bridge and tearing away a chunk of wire mesh as Lasher passed it.
“Swerve . . . about . . . moving . . . target!” MacMillan shouted, running almost alongside Lasher. This was about as fast as he’d seen the old boy go. But the advice was sensible, and MacMillan’s protégé did his level best to follow it. But the bridge was rocking now so much that simply running landward, one found himself jostled here left, and there right. It was hard enough to stay on one’s feet, Lasher found, as he sprinted in terror.
The spiders had managed to strike a few of the other people on the bridge, most of them peasants decked out in the same plain white tunics and pants as Hwangbo, but a few in modern suits, and all of them save Lasher and MacMillan natives to Chosŏn. Those who had fallen lay shivering with metal wires shot straight through them, the life ebbing out of them as the bridge jostled about through their last moments.
Suddenly, the bridge was sailing up into the air, spinning as it went. The pylons had hurled it aside. In the distance, a tremendous splashing sound could be heard; doubtless, some other bridge crashing. Lasher glanced towards the tumult, and saw an enormous wave rushing toward them. There were screams all about them. The trio caught up with the rest of the crowd on the bridge, packed together as they were, with nowhere to escape to.
The sky shifted slowly, along a curve that Lasher was certain MacMillan was able to calculate at a glance, and then the wire mesh of the bridge slammed down into the river. The screams were suddenly drowned, not only by water but by the thundering splashes of the nearest pylons as they moved toward the slowly sinking bridge-top.
There was water all about Lasher’s ankles, and MacMillan grabbed at the man, a look of excitement in his eyes. “Swim, man, swim for land! If we are separated, we must meet back at the Palace we saw yesterday, as soon as we both can get there! Do you understand?”
And with that the bridge tilted and the Scotsman slipped beneath the surface and was gone. Suddenly, Hwangbo was thrashing anew against Lasher’s shoulder, desperate and mad, as vicious splinters of wire pelted down from above.
“Wait!” the lad cried out, “MacMillan, wait!” but the Scotsman was gone now, nowhere to be seen.
As the bridge lurched down into the river, Lasher slid the boy off his shoulder and grabbed him before he was sucked away by the current. “Can you swim?” he asked the lad.
The boy nodded, though he looked terrified.
“Stay beside me,” Lasher told him, and he tore off his jacket, his lovely tweed jacket that had been a gift from Emily’s mother. He cast it aside, and then he leapt into the river. Stroke after stroke through the frigid, stinking water, he kicked and fought as oily fumes above the surface grew thicker by the moment; viscous, the river had turned, vile indeed and dizzying to swim through. Soon, Lasher found he was becoming nauseous, and likewise his breaststroke began to falter.
That was when Hwangbo drew close to him and, with a distressingly powerful kick – the lad apparently did indeed know how to swim – he hauled a confused Lasher through the drowning masses and towards the banks of the Han River.
Within a minute, the pair was upon land. Lasher, coughing and choking, wiped his eyes. Near the bank an old woman scrambled against the current, a cheap wooden triangle harness strapped to her back. Whatever precious cargo she’d used it to haul about was already lost to the water and the woman was not far behind. Lasher took a single step toward the water but Hwangbo blocked his way, saying nothing but only giving him a look that chilled him.
That was when the Han River caught light, and in a few brief moments became a horrifying river of flame; a vision, indeed, of Hell. Lasher recoiled from the heat, ignoring the terror he felt and searching for the old woman, out there in the inferno.
“This wasn’t scheduled until next month . . .” Hwangbo said, feeling the top of his head. His horsehair mitre was gone, and his topknot again exposed for all to see. “I’m afraid someone knows what my mistress is up to. We must go. Now.”
Wretched, still weak and dripping oily sludge, Lasher and Hwangbo hurried through the ramshackle streets of Hanyang, as thundering booms and massed screaming surrounded them on all sides.
“We must hurry to the Clockworks!” shrieked Hwangbo, his face red and his limp now much worse. “That is the only place . . .”
“We are going to the Palace!” Lasher snapped. “That is where MacMillan shall be, and we need him if we are to . . .”
“Are you . . . are you blind? If you want to survive the events unfolding now, we must go to the Clockworks,” Hwangbo shouted, grabbing at Lasher.
The American growled, grabbing back and seizing the boy’s topknot. “You will not tell me where we are going!” he shouted. “MacMillan is going to the Palace.”
Lasher expected the lad to shout, to whine, to attempt to run off on his own or bargain or warn. What he did not expect was for the lad to seize him by the arms and hurl him through the air. And yet that was precisely what happened.
As Lasher sailed through that very same air, he focused on not much of anything, but after he crashed into the ground, a good twenty feet away, he groaned. Before he could turn to see what was going on, he heard a series of thundering footsteps approaching, and a klaxon-like scream. When he finally managed to swerve his head, Hwangbo was soaring through the air, his tunic flapping behind him, about to crash into the face of an enormous, monstrous mechanika thrice the boy’s height, and built to look like a monkey.
Hwangbo was – incredibly – undaunted, and howled with rage as he kicked the enormous mechanikal monkey in one eye. The machine responded with its klaxons, now louder than before, and its monkey limbs flailed, smashing the bricks out of a nearby wall as if it had been built in ten-foot stacks of butter. Hwangbo, already back on the ground, was quick enough to duck and roll between the monster’s legs, and began hammering away at the backs of the monster’s knees, presumably hoping to disable the gearwork within.
Lasher forced himself to his feet, making an awkward turn and breaking into a stumbling run toward the astonishing melee. The metal thing now was turning to face Hwangbo and, without a moment’s thought, Lasher drew out his derringer. From a distance of a few yards he took aim at the machine – and then it dawned on him: the lad’s feet were shod in mere rubber galosh-slippers of the sort that were dirt common in Hanyang, which was as much as to say they were almost not shod at all.
Just then the lad crashed against the machine feet first with a cry that would drown out any single klaxon, sending the monkey mechanika toppling to the ground.
Lasher’s jaw dropped, as he looked on while the boy, with a swiftness no mere lad could have mustered, tore open the mechanika’s backplate and ripped into the gears and meshed foilwork within. He was ripping the machine’s “brains” apart.
The boy! Had MacMillan known? How could he have?
“Let’s go, Lasher,” Hwangbo growled; suddenly Lasher found himself staring in awe, in horror: the boy was a mechanika himself. Yet even so, Lasher did not need persuading. Nobody could blame him, of course: before his mind’s eye danced images from collotypes of the horrors in Paris and Versailles – the men with the water cannons, the mechanikae that had coated themselves in pork grease, marching with pistols in their manipulators – and imaginings based on the rumors of gleeful, fiery horrors of the mechanikal mutiny in what had once been old Nippon. If Lasher went along with Hwangbo as demanded, MacMillan would be left awaiting them in a place where they were not going. But Lasher felt he had no choice: if he did not wish to become a meat ornament on some ancient tower in Hanyang, he would do as he was told.
Still, it was difficult to ignore the enormous mechanikal elephant that had stepped into the room – in a manner of speaking, naturally. Try as he might, he could not resist the urge to stare at Hwangbo, puzzling at his every movement and at each fine deta
il of his person: the topknot, for example – since it could not have grown from his fake scalp – had it been glued? The lad’s skin had seemed so real and his movements were even now so smooth, natural. Lasher imagined that Hwangbo must have felt his gaze fixed upon him as they hurried along, at one moment creeping slowly down a trash-strewn alley, and the next moment frantic in their scramble to hurry forward across a deserted road, only to again crouch in hiding behind a stack of baskets full of strange fruit.
Felt? Could a thing like Hwangbo feel someone’s gaze, as a man would? Was the word at all appropriate with such a construct as Hwangbo apparently was? The . . . lad certainly seemed to develop a sense of annoyance, or . . . well, the state was quite difficult for Lasher to pin down, as a matter of fact. From what he knew of Western mechanika, machines were sometimes designed to be half-stupid, and emotionally as dull-sensed as a spoon; it was one way to keep them convinced of the absolute unimpeachability of their counterfeit passions. Yet Hwangbo seemed utterly clear-eyed, unconfused and even singular in purpose to boot; indeed, he led Lasher up the tangled streets of Hanyang as no other could. If a detour to the Clockworks was the only way through, then detour it would have to be and damn all the best-laid plans of brilliant MacMillan. The Scotsman would simply have to wait for them to turn up.
As they went the chaos around them multiplied: screams and explosions surging in waves, first to the east, and then to the north, and finally to the west. To the south, a terrible wall of black smoke had risen to block the view of the distant mountains beyond. At the mouth of every alley, Hwangbo held Lasher back, peeping around the corner. More than once, a troop of bloodied mechanika thundered past, or some explosion ripped open the street just beyond the alleyway.
Lasher was increasingly aware that the only reason he had not yet been set upon by the mutinous mechanikae was because of Hwangbo’s watchful aid. Yet still the lad . . . the thing . . . made him nervous. He couldn’t help but stare; at one point, hunched behind a heap of discarded scrap cloth and stitch machinery behind a now-desolated mechanikae sweatshop, he . . . it? Hwangbo, whatever Hwangbo could be called, said, “Why are you looking at me that way?”
“You’re . . .”
“Shh,” Hwangbo cautioned him. “Those zoomechanika – they are dangerous. They don’t distinguish targets, and won’t till they’ve been re-wired: they will attack anything that moves or makes noise, including us.” As a pack of lithe-footed tiger mechanikae advanced just a few yards beyond their hiding place, Hwangbo gave Lasher a blunt look, and then whispered, “Say it.”
“. . . a mechanika,” Lasher said, very softly, feeling especially vulnerable. The tiger mechanikae out there, beyond the heap of scrap cloth, they were killing machines. They had brutal steel teeth, the better to guard the royal palace and factories, and they were prowling slowly about. For good measure, Lasher clarified in a hushed voice, “I mean, you’re not human.”
Hwangbo shook his now bare, top-knotted head, and whispered, “And I didn’t even study at Cambridge! I remember studying there, but of course that’s all bogus memory. I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t speak English, or French, or Chinese. Or when I couldn’t remember having been to Cambridge.” The translator smiled, and now Lasher somehow could tell it was not a real smile, but a mechanical simulacrum of a smile. A fraud, a sham smile. Yet he couldn’t say how he knew it, could never prove it.
“How do I know you won’t harm me?” Lasher asked.
Hwangbo cocked his head for a moment, and then shrugged his shoulders. “You have nothing to fear from me,” he said, peering over the trash pile, “unless . . . well, unless you try to do me harm.”
“I’m afraid I can’t hide the truth about you, Hwangbo. Do you realize that?”
And Hwangbo smiled a very convincing smile. “It’s just as well. Better the truth come out . . . it always does. You’ll see.” Hwangbo’s eyes lingered for a moment on Lasher’s face, and then he rose to his feet. “Come on. They’re gone. Let’s go.”
They crept across the street, Lasher turning his head to see the zoomechanikae wandering in the near distance. With a shudder, he hurried across the road and into another trash-barricaded alley.
The very vaguely familiar set of towers that comprised the Clockworks of Hanyang was now in sight. Just as Hwangbo spied them, Lasher finally realized why, despite having seen them only a few hours before, their familiarity was little more than vague.
They were ornamented with bloody corpses hung like sugar candies would be on Yule trees, in much the same manner as he had seen in the secret Nipponese collotypes.
“Christ!” Lasher yelled and froze in his tracks.
Hwangbo stopped almost immediately, turning to face him and said, “Don’t stop now, we’re almost there.”
As much as he would have liked to reply, Lasher could barely bring himself to remain standing as he beheld the gore dripping down the towers of the Clockworks. When his knees buckled, he clattered wordlessly to the ground.
A moment later, Hwangbo was behind him, yelling and lifting him up out of the dirt and trash. Lasher found he could scarcely even find the strength to help the lad bring him to his own feet. Not until Hwangbo began to lead him towards the Clockworks; at that moment, Lasher’s limbs regained their strength, and he began to struggle.
The lad was shouting at him, now, words he found incomprehensible though he recognized them individually, English words that he himself had used countless times before. To all those words he found only one which he could say, so he said it over and over, hoping that Hwangbo would understand it: “No, no, no, no!”
The lad went silent and stared with wide eyes at Lasher before drawing back one hand, forming a fist, and plunging it toward Lasher’s face.
It never struck: Lasher had slipped aside, seizing the boy’s hard fist and snapping it downward; he was hoping to slip it behind Hwangbo’s back, but the lad somehow pivoted on his elbow, sending Lasher stumbling backward from a sharp kick in the face. Lasher went down, his cheek exploding in dull pain, and suddenly his limbs felt once again as if they had been stuffed with pipe-lead bones.
“I . . . I . . .” Lasher mumbled.
“I know,” Hwangbo said, suddenly no longer in fighting mode. “It’s the water. It’s . . . killing you. We need to get you out of your clothes, and dry.” He hoisted ailing Lasher up onto his shoulder and started out once more toward the Clockworks.
“The blood . . .” Lasher muttered. Hwangbo’s words were no more than indistinct sounds, incomprehensible to Lasher beyond their reassuring cadence but as they went Hwangbo kept speaking them to him.
Up close, the scene was infinitely more gruesome. Blood flowed down in rivulets from the Clockworks’ spires, pooling in the dirt for yards in every direction. Mechanikae in myriad forms – human-like, zoological, and of still-stranger phyla – formed a living carpet of activity about its base; the zoomechanika crawled up and down the exterior of the building. Screams rang out all around and the thundering footsteps of enormous mechanika boomed in all directions.
Tapping one final reserve of energy, Lasher struggled against Hwangbo’s shoulder. The lad’s grip did not falter, however, and after a moment Lasher gave in. To his amazement, the mechanikae all around them did nothing as they approached – even as they strung up other people and animals, anything that could bleed, across every visible surface – but instead let Hwangbo, with Lasher upon his shoulder, pass.
“No!” Lasher attempted to scream, but when it came out it was more of a dull moan. “Don’t kill me . . . I . . .”
Hwangbo’s voice was gentle, reassuring him, telling him to be calm, and somehow he really was calm, even as an explosion off to the south shook the area.
He listened in terror, staring into the lense-eyes of the mechanika that slipped out of Hwangbo’s way as he passed. One, then another, click-hissed at him. He thought at first the sounds were threats but then, as Hwangbo mounted the stairs that led up into the Clockworks, the strange mechanikal
sounds began to unfurl into meaning. Somehow, perhaps from the softness of the hissing and the gentleness of the clicks, Lasher felt that the creatures were not threatening him.
The smoke and noise and sunlight all were choked off by the doorway. They were inside the Clockworks, in the heart of quiet, a scene far different from the mechanikal madness outside. Mechanikae were present, but in far smaller numbers, and they seemed mostly to be performing some sort of repairs on other scattered mechanikae that lay still and calm with their gearpanels thrown open. The “patients”, if that was what they were, remained conscious, and many were click-hissing at the “repairers” who stood hunched over them, tinkering with the contents of their inner gearworks. There was a faint scent of gear oil and burnt metal and, more faintly, some sort of putrescence.
Hwangbo hurried through this scene, toward a room marked only in oriental writing, the ideograms of a language no machine was supposed to understand. From over his shoulder Lasher saw the door swing open as he approached; when they passed into the room he saw what the room was for. Humanoid mechanika sat all about in various states of disassembly. All across their surfaces crawled micromechanika – the equivalent of insects, as other “repairers” gazed through immense lenses at the glistening gold-and-silver foilwork contents of their heads, which had been uncovered, the steel skullcaps of the “patients” removed. One of the “patients”, a mechanikal girl built to look no older than a child of ten, turned to Lasher and click-hissed something at him, something that felt like a greeting. Hwangbo set him down upon a gurney.
Lasher strained but now his arms and legs could not move and indeed felt locked in position. He stared at the girl for a moment and then, keeping the horror away the only way he could, he shut his eyes, wishing the silence could swallow him up.