The Library Machine (The Extraordinary Journeys of Clockwork Charlie)

by Dave Butler

  he spun and raised the tuba—

  and bong! caught his attacker’s head in the flaring bell.

  Charlie charged toward the stairs, pushing his enemy by the tuba shoved around his head. With a final heave, he hurled his attacker down the spiral steps.

  “Thomas!”

  No answer.

  Charlie bounded down the stairs after his opponent. If it was Thomas, he wanted to help his brother. And if it was some kind of impersonator, Charlie was afraid it would find the real Thomas and hurt him.

  As his feet touched the stone of the third floor, a wrong shadow warned Charlie. He dropped to the floor and rolled, and his attacker crashed into the wall where Charlie had just stood.

  Charlie scrambled toward the nearest wall-hung tapestry. It was modern-looking, for a tapestry, and depicted two men in puffy hats (the kind Charlie had seen on pictures of Henry VIII and Thomas More) sitting at a table talking. One of the men pointed up and the other pointed down, and other men sat in a circle around the table, watching intently.

  Only the faintest scratch on stone behind him warned that he was about to be attacked, but it was enough—Charlie balled both his fists into the thick tapestry and kicked off the wall with his feet, pulling the tapestry free and hurling it behind him.

  The scratch was silenced as Charlie caught his attacker under the tapestry. Charlie didn’t hesitate; he ran into the next room and grabbed a mace off its stand. The mace was a heavy spiked iron ball on the end of an iron handle, with a brittle leather strap wound around the bar to create a grip.

  Charlie raced back into the tapestry room. The tapestry he’d pulled to the floor was rumpled to a large peak in the center, and Charlie rushed forward, swinging the mace down over his head—

  BOOM!

  The mace slammed to the floor, the violence of its sound echoing through the annex. Charlie’s attacker wasn’t under the tapestry, then. Where was he?

  Charlie bolted up the stairs again. He heard a cracking sound and felt sick with worry. His mechanisms strained and heated as he pushed himself to throw one foot in front of the other as fast as he could.

  Pounding back into the room full of mannequins, Charlie saw a strange sight. Thomas lay on the floor. One arm was broken, snapped nearly off through the upper arm. Thomas crouched over him, or rather, Not-Thomas did, its hands around Thomas’s neck.

  Charlie threw the mace.

  CRUNCH! He scored a direct hit, nailing the attacking creature right in its forehead. The monster rolled back with the force of Charlie’s attack, crashing onto the keyboard of the vertically strung piano.

  Charlie didn’t let up. Snatching the mace off the floor, he hit Not-Thomas in the chest, knocking it up over the keyboard and through the piano’s strings.

  As the creature sprang to its feet on the other side of the piano, Charlie got a good look at its face. Most of the features were Thomas’s, but where Charlie had hit the beast, its skin had turned translucent and rubbery-looking. And instead of Thomas’s eyes, it now had eyes that were completely black.

  Red Cloak. Charlie was fighting Red Cloak.

  What kind of monster was it?

  Charlie brought the mace down hard on top of the beast’s head. It fell to the floor groaning, but it wasn’t dead, or even unconscious. As it whimpered a complaint, Charlie grabbed his enemy by the ankle and dragged it to the nearest window. He saw forest outside, so he was facing away from the castle.

  With a running start and the biggest heave he could muster, Charlie hurled the creature into the window. Glass shattered as Charlie’s antagonist dropped to the castle grounds.

  Charlie leaned on the windowsill to see the result. To his disappointment, Red Cloak hit the ground, rolled, and then rose to its feet. With a hiss and a last flash of black eyes in Charlie’s direction, it dropped over a wall into the forest below.

  Charlie’s legs trembled.

  Not good. He rejoined his brother.

  “Thomas.”

  “I’m sorry. I…had to hide.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I understand.”

  “Thanks, Charlie.”

  Charlie nodded as his legs jerked twice, hard. “You’d better wind my mainspring, and then we need to get out of here.”

  Thomas’s upper arm turned inward where Red Cloak had broken it. This left the limb twisted across the front of his chest at an unnatural angle, so Charlie tucked the broken arm inside Thomas’s coat and buttoned the coat with only the good arm in a sleeve. He thrust the end of the empty sleeve into one of the coat’s pockets.

  It didn’t look quite as natural and inconspicuous as he would have liked, but it was better than having the arm visible.

  “Charlie,” Thomas said, “we can’t leave without the horn.”

  Charlie nodded. He picked up the mace again, just in case, and they searched the rest of the annex. They found art and even chunks of masonry taken out of Marburg’s oldest churches when they had been renovated. They found furniture. They found maps of Marburg, and Hesse, and Germany. They found paintings and sculpture.

  And finally, not on the highest floor of the annex, but on the lowest, they found the unicorn horn’s display. The display included other natural wonders, including a mandrake root, a lamb born with two faces, a bottle full of human kidney stones, and a display comparing the skull shapes and sizes of various folk, including hulder, pixie, dwarf, alfar, kinnari, and djinn. The djinn skull was particularly fascinating, not for its stubby horns, but because it was only visible directly from the front—when Charlie stepped to the side and tried to look at it, the skull disappeared.

  The landgrave’s collection included a hand of glory (the pickled hand of a hanged man, converted into a candle), a stuffed mermaid (who looked a lot like a monkey with most of a fish stitched to its lower half), a pair of shoes once worn by Saint Elizabeth of Hungary (who had surprisingly big feet), and an orrery (a model of the sun and planets that moved when Charlie turned a crank in its base). And a pedestal marked HORN DES EINHORNS. As Charlie looked at the note, its letters rearranged themselves until they spelled UNICORN’S HORN. Thereafter, looking at the words, he seemed to see both German and English words simultaneously.

  And there it was, the unicorn’s horn. The nail of the elemental world.

  “Shouldn’t it look more…magical?” Charlie asked.

  Thomas shrugged. “It looks like the one my father had.”

  The horn was as long as Charlie’s arm, a straight spike the color of old ivory, with a faint spiral twist running around the outside of it. Charlie took it and tucked it under his arm.

  “Okay. Now let’s get you looked at.”

  Charlie opened a third-story window and prepared to jump, but Thomas grabbed his elbow. “That’s a long drop.”

  Charlie laughed. “Remember when you threw me off the mountain, Thomas? Trust me…this drop is nothing.”

  Thomas hugged his broken arm to himself and said nothing.

  “Okay,” Charlie said. He looked out the window and found a ledge running below it, around the building. “We’ll go back through the castle.”

  He climbed out along the stone shelf and Thomas followed.

  The ledge led them back along the elevated passage, and then the two boys were creeping along the outside of the castle’s main building.

  “Look,” Thomas called from behind.

  Charlie turned back to peer through the window. Within was the long, narrow dining table they’d seen earlier, from the other side.

  Various parties filed into the room and began to sit.

  Charlie pressed himself against the wall, and Thomas did the same. They stood on opposite sides of the window, both unseen by the people inside.

  Charlie pointed at the ground. Should they jump down now?

  Thomas shook his head.

  Charlie
sighed and peeked through the window.

  Along the table to his right Charlie saw a row of people. Nearest to him were the landgrave and two counselors, all dressed in severe black. The landgrave was the man Charlie had met earlier in the castle, the man who had waved Charlie along when Charlie carried a bucket of paint and pretended to have work to do in the castle. He seemed more tired now, and he sat between two men older than him, with less hair and long beards, who leaned in to make soft comments to their leader.

  Beyond the landgrave were three kobolds in high-collared formal wear. They shuffled the papers in front of them, reading and rereading the same passages. None of them was Jan Wijmoor, but Charlie guessed they must be leaders of the goblin community…What had Wijmoor called it? The Marburger Syndikat?

  On the far side of the kobolds sat a company of fairies. Their leader was a woman with an exploding mane of bright blue hair and wings that were streaked orange and yellow. She had to be the one Levi Rosenbaum had called the undergravine, and she also had two companions. All three of them wore plate armor that looked like blue tortoiseshells, and they perched on high, tiny-seated stools.

  Beside the kobolds a single hulder hunched forward on a low bench, wearing one of the fur caps Charlie had seen in the Altstadt and an ornately stitched white shirt under a leather vest.

  On the left side of the table sat fewer people, all men. Charlie saw the skull-and-crossbones commander he’d seen in the square, the thief and destroyer of books. He saw the Sinister Man, Gaston St. Jacques. And he saw himself.

  He and Thomas locked eyes briefly; then Charlie stared again at himself. Or, rather, at the person who looked like him. He was even wearing a hat just like Charlie had recently worn.

  Or was it the very same hat?

  That had to be Red Cloak. The monster, the shape-changer. How had it joined this meeting in the castle so quickly? Was it the same Red Cloak—or were there two of them?

  At the head of the table, facing Charlie, stood Rabbi Levi Rosenbaum. He wore a long white shawl over his shoulders, striped with black and fringed at the ends. The rabbi held his hands pressed together and kept turning to look at Not-Charlie, struggling to keep a baffled expression from his face.

  “I should probably begin by thanking you all,” Rabbi Rosenbaum said. “I was surprised at the invitation, but my community is honored. And personally, of course, I am flattered.”

  He spoke German, and Charlie understood perfectly.

  “We didn’t invite you,” the Sinister Man said.

  “Shh.” The hulder glowered at him.

  One of the landgrave’s advisors, a man with a bulbous nose, spoke up, waving his index finger in a slow circle. “We invited the rabbi, Monsieur St. Jacques. This realm has a long history of including all its folk in its deliberations. Given the goodness of our purpose here, and how the rabbi’s folk too shall gain from Hesse’s neutrality in the upcoming conflict, his participation, and indeed a short invocation by him, seemed appropriate.”

  “Don’t be so quick to commit yourself to neutrality,” the book thief snapped. “You’d be well advised to fully inform yourself of your options first.”

  “We are grateful to you, I am sure,” St. Jacques said, “for including all your folk in these proceedings. We think all your people will be interested in what we have to say.”

  The pixie’s advisors seemed to be urging her to patience, but she hissed at them and they bowed. “What’s that, Frenchman?” the blue-haired pixie asked. “I’m ready to listen now.”

  St. Jacques smiled. “We should hear the rabbi out first.”

  “You know, I find myself in this interesting position,” Rosenbaum continued. “I’m a guest here. I’m a stranger of sorts. My people have lived here a few generations, but we’re recent arrivals. The landgrave’s family has been here for centuries.”

  “I thought the rabbi was going to say a prayer and leave,” the thief said. “That would have been tedious enough. This is worse.”

  “But then I think,” Rosenbaum continued, “after all, what is a German? To the Romans, a German just meant ‘one of those barbarians who live over across the river where there used to be Celts.’ And that’s me: I’m one of the barbarians over the river. I’m a German. Yes, I’m something else, I’m a Jew also, but I’m German. I speak German in my home; I love my German neighbors; I play German music.

  “And I’m Hessian, too!” The rabbi bowed slightly in the landgrave’s direction. “I live in Marburg, in Hesse. I pay my taxes to the Landgrave of Hesse.”

  One of the kobolds sputtered. “Yes, yes, this is elementary taxonomy. You are also a rabbi, and a human. So what? I am a German, and a Hessian, and a kobold, and an engineer.”

  “Exactly!” Rosenbaum clapped his hands together. “So maybe, I think, it’s perfect that I’ve been invited. Maybe the landgrave and his counselors have chosen me for a very specific, a very symbolic reason. Even if they didn’t intend it, because of course some of the most powerful symbols come right out of that part of our souls that we don’t see very well. My presence here—the presence of a stranger, an outsider, but someone who in other ways is very much at home—should maybe remind you that we’re all strangers. And we’re all family at the same time. And everybody can belong to many kinds of folk at the same time. That’s fine, that’s normal: nature makes overlapping circles and crisscrossing lines. The strange thing would be if there were no overlaps, if everybody were either a complete stranger, or family.

  “Instead, everyone is a little bit a stranger, and a little bit family. And that’s all good—that’s a beautiful thing! Because if you and I are a little bit family, then we have things in common; we have shared ideas; we know how to talk to each other. Common ground, you see. But if we’re also a little bit strangers, then you know things I don’t. So I can learn from you. And maybe—I don’t want to be presumptuous, so I’m saying maybe—there are things you could learn from me, too.

  “I think this is what my presence here should remind us all. And so now we have visitors from the east, from Prussia and the kaiser. And you’re a little bit strangers to us: you’re driving big vehicles we’ve never seen before, and you speak our language with an accent. But you’re also family. We’re all Germans. And we’re all people. So whatever you’ve come to discuss—”

  “We have declared war on France,” the book thief said.

  “Nooooo!” the jotun lowed.

  Rabbi Rosenbaum’s hands fell to his side. “Yes…but…”

  “Declarations are just paper.” The landgrave leaned forward over the table to address the thief. “Words. Don’t rush. We would be happy to smooth over trade issues, land, access to steel and coal. We know the French. As the rabbi says, we’re family; we can work these things out. This very castle is famous for being a place to resolve difficult issues. When Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli disagreed—”

  “You fail to understand,” the book thief said. “We do not go to war over economics. We certainly do not go to war over silly issues of superstition. We go to war to fix this broken world. Today France, tomorrow the rest.”

  “And if I would not be fixed?” The pixie ruler shot off her stool into the air and raised her voice to a stern shout. “Would you go to war with me, human?”

  “A new world is coming,” the book thief said calmly. “The rabbi is wrong. It’s not a strength that we’re all strangers; it’s a weakness. A new world is coming, and in it we will be one folk. One state. Everyone reading the same books, everyone believing the same truths. Everyone taken care of and served by machines.”

  “That has a kind of superficial beauty,” the landgrave said. “But it’s wicked nonsense.”

  “Is it nonsense?” the thief asked. “Do you know how pixies decide who will rule in their realms? Violent combat, like some medieval story. Do you know what displaced hulder youth do when machines and big bus
inesses take over more and more of their farming work? They drift into the big cities, like garbage blowing on the wind, and drink themselves into a stupor with milk. Dwarfs won’t live in houses and won’t even say each other’s names, because they’re afraid of some ancient enemy that, as far as I can tell, doesn’t even exist! Of all the elder folk, the alfar are the wisest—they just hide from the rest of us! And that’s not even to mention human beings.”

  Charlie frowned. What the thief said had some truth in it.

  “And what gives you the right to judge those folk?” the landgrave asked steadily. “What makes you so sure your ways are superior? If you wish to talk to dwarfs and invite them to live in houses, or try to explain to them that houses are superior, no one will stop you. Indeed, I would welcome such a conversation in the landgraviate, with open arms. But you didn’t come here with bulletins and debaters. You brought soldiers and guns. If you are going to compel the world to live as you see fit, what will be the cost?”

  “The time for talking is over,” St. Jacques said. “Now it is time for deeds.”

  “We’ll all have to become Prussian, you mean!” The bulbous-nosed man was nearly shouting.

  St. Jacques shook his head. “What comes now didn’t start in Prussia. It started everywhere. Prussia is merely the hammer, the tool in the hand that will move us forward to the next phase. In the future there will be no Prussia, no France, and no Hesse.”

  “There will be no them,” the thief added. “We will all be us. Doesn’t that sound lovely, Rabbi? No overlapping, everyone just in a single circle? All of us acting together for the common good? All of us living wise and protected lives, making good choices because the bad choices—or at least the worst choices—are taken away from us? Every person living in leisure and served by machines?”

  “You are offering to conquer us.” The landgrave smiled gently. “This has been attempted before. If you read the history of the Thirty Years’ War, you’ll find that Hesse—”

  “Hesse will come into the new order of things,” Gaston St. Jacques said. “What you are offered is the chance to join peaceably, and spare your subjects the death and misery that must otherwise rain down upon them.”