The Clockwork Dynasty

by Daniel H. Wilson

  Peter nods, and I catch the tiniest hint of surprise that I know Greek mythology.

  I pluck the heavy brass ring from his palm and hold it between my thumb and forefinger. The surface is covered in tiny scratches and faint, washed-out writing. I turn to the passenger window and, feeling like an idiot, lift the circle to my eye.

  The side of the building erupts with flaming script.

  I pull the cedalion away and the mirrored skyscraper reverts to normal. Gingerly, I look through it again and watch the golden-red flames reappear. They are arranged into a large symbol, like an eye, writhing and twisting across the surface of the building but somehow staying in place.

  “Oh my god…” I breathe. “What the hell is that?”

  “A sigil,” says Peter. “It indicates this is the domain of an avtomat. Those with friendly intentions will be granted entrance, ideally. Any others will be killed.”

  “These signs…they’re everywhere?”

  “Only sparingly. Once, it was impossible for humans to intercept our messages. Now you have technologies that can do it, so we are more careful. But for all of history, our messages have haunted the faces of your temples and monuments.”

  Still peering through the cedalion, I pull out the relic that hangs around my neck. Looking down, I see that it, too, has erupted with a flaming scrawl. A symbol I have never seen before, like a teardrop, traces across the curl of metal.

  Fumbling in my pocket, I pull out a notebook. Squinting at the flaming script through the cedalion, I use a stubby pencil to mark the contours of what I’m seeing. While I’m at it, I glance up at the domain sigil and draw a copy of it, too.

  In the seat beside me, Peter chuckles.

  “What?” I ask, scribbling frantically, not looking up.

  “You remind me of someone,” he says quietly.

  I can’t identify the letters, but the lines remind me of early Chinese symbols. Something about it is elegant and simplistic and ancient.

  “What is this symbol on my relic?” I ask, lowering the cedalion. “What’s it mean, exactly?”

  Peter’s face is empty, his jaw set. Looking past me, he answers brusquely: “The relic was made before my time, inscribed with an elder language. The Word it bears has no direct translation to the tongues of men.”

  “Word? What’s that mean?”

  Peter opens his door. “Stay near me,” he says.

  “Do you trust this friend of yours or not?” I ask.

  “Completely,” says Peter. “The question is whether or not he trusts me.”

  There’s a logic to all this, I’m telling myself. No matter how crazy it seems, the world always operates by the rules. Those rules can be understood, even if it doesn’t seem like it at first.

  I step out of the car into the cold morning. As Peter struggles to get out of his side, I turn the monocle over in my hands, reasoning out loud. “It must be some kind of metamaterial. Crafted to work as a wide spectrum lens, bending nonvisible light into something I can see. But it’s more than that. It’s doing some processing, too. Sensing patterns. And it must be at least as old as you are.

  “How did you make it?”

  “I didn’t,” says Peter, as he climbs out of the car on his broken leg.

  I hurry around the side of the vehicle, suppressing a shiver in the dawn. Putting an arm out to steady him, I let Peter lean on me. His lips are pressed into a line, eyelids fluttering. As he puts his bulky arm around my shoulder, I feel an irregular vibration rattling inside his chest. Frowning, he takes cautious steps, dragging his broken leg.

  “The cedalion pulls information from the world like water through a stone,” he says. I hold him, concerned at how he is cradling his heart. As we move around the car, I put the device back to my eye. The wall across the street lights up in the chicken scratch of a forgotten language, symbols written in cold light over condensation.

  “Is this how you see the world?” I ask.

  “I see as you do,” Peter replies. “Only more.”

  The flaming eye stretches up like beautiful artwork. Something flickers in the reflection of the glass wall and I turn.

  “Wow,” I say. “This is really—”

  And I see Peter through the cedalion for the first time.

  His skin is glowing, complex ribbons of reddish-orange light spreading across his chest and lacing over his face. Now, I can plainly see the intricate seams where his flesh fits together. And I notice a rapid, unsteady pulse of a clockwork heart beneath the metal ribs of his chest. A worrisome blue glow leaks from a wound over his heart, like a spreading stain.

  Peter is beautiful, and something is going seriously wrong inside him.

  “Yes?” he asks.

  “Nothing,” I say. “Never mind. Let’s go.”

  I pocket the cedalion and Peter returns to his normal, stern figure—tall and imperious with sharp features and dark eyes. He leans on me, dragging his injured leg as we move through the shadow of this mammoth skyscraper.

  Instead of crossing the street to the building lobby, Peter leads me down the sidewalk to the wide mouth of an express lane tunnel. We circle around a concrete pillar to reach a rusted steel door embedded in blank concrete, a silver keypad beside it. Peter pushes a long series of numbers, ignoring the rush of traffic a few feet away. A lock thunks and he pulls the handle. As the door swings open, its metal face winks against the dawn like a bloody razor.

  24

  LONDON, 1750

  “Never again,” I said to my sister, returning to our empty flat on the day of our disastrous outing in Tyburn. “We must be more careful from now on.”

  I remember Elena looked at me darkly then, an argument waiting on her lips. But seeing the concern on my face, she chose to bite down on the words.

  She chose to wait, for that night, at least.

  Resisting the urge to flee, we quietly set about living a hidden life, cloistered in several apartments spread across different districts. I reduce my debt-collecting duties and restrict travel to the outskirts of town, always on the watch for avtomat markings. Offered a stake in a fledgling bank, we gamble the majority of our resources and invest.

  The great paradox of London is the startling ease with which we are able to disappear among hundreds of thousands of people. We discover a faceless solitude among strangers that is only possible in such a vast metropolis. Immortal among the humans, immune to their passions and vices, Elena and I immerse ourselves in the gray anonymity of routine.

  Years pass, and our investments recoup a small but thriving fortune.

  Over time, I begin to convince myself the attack by Leizu was a fluke, simple bad luck. The sheer accumulation of habits, resources, and familiarity keeps us rooted to the pathways of London. Paris beckons, and even Saint Petersburg, but I do not dare push beyond our accustomed boundaries.

  And all the while, a dull pain is gnawing deep in my breast—the ache of not meeting my Word. Watching over the girl like a jailer, limiting my movement and exposure, I sense that I am failing to serve pravda. My tsar is gone. The sense of loss grows slowly, an agony that laces its way through my body and mind like a disease.

  This land has its own sovereign, and I find myself paying attention to King George II’s occasional proclamations. In the newspapers, they call him the “absent king” and accuse him of warmongering.

  Elena continues her studies from behind closed doors, as she did for decades in the depths of the Kremlin. Through ferocious correspondence, she spreads her intellect into the world, securing and building our fortune while she is at it. The volume of letters passing to and from our properties is astonishing. No fewer than three servants busy themselves with dropping off or receiving bundles of letters at various coffee shops, depending on the pen name attached.

  Even so, the girl herself is trapped, wilting in our apartments.

  Out of the sheer necessity of keeping Elena sane, we take to occasionally risking a late night symphony or opera. Always in the latest fashion, Elena do
ns a kaleidoscopic medley of dresses and stockings and buckled shoes. Her hair is lustrous, always perfectly coiffed; her shining face as bright and alive as an immortal child’s. Perfumed and slight, her little arms are often clasped around my neck with an inhuman strength, the girl perched and alert in the crow’s nest of my embrace.

  We sweep through the crowds—a vision of familial perfection under the forgiving flicker of dim lamps—unapproachable and anonymous.

  Elena keeps a nanny to tend to the endless parade of tutors she researches and invites to visit, shipping them in from around Europe and the Far East. In our parlor, I am as likely to meet a composer as an inventor or painter—all of them desperate for a wealthy patron.

  The girl takes to playing instruments, the harp, harpsichord, and lute. A small savant, a prodigy, she is taught in succession by waves of the best musicians produced by humanity. These men and women come to our dimly lit parlor to perform and instruct an odd little girl with incredible instincts and ferocious determination.

  I shake hands at the door and excuse myself to roam the dark streets.

  Walking along the Thames as the lamplighters set about their work, watching thieves and criminals ply their trade, my heart is crying out for justice. But my career has evolved beyond the knuckle-scraping collection of fugitive debtors. Over the last three decades, our investments have grown a thousandfold. My operations are watched over by stern-faced, mustached men—the grown-up children of my first partners.

  Five years is the amount of time before Elena’s perpetual youth sparks suspicion. Every half decade, the precocious child must shed her life like a snake sheds its skin. We move, leaving behind nannies and tutors and friends. We learn to change our faces and our accents. We buy and sell apartments, moving in unpredictable orbits but always pushing toward the outskirts of the ever-expanding town—farther from the avtomat signs, continuing to elude the horribly powerful creature called Leizu.

  The years seem to accelerate.

  Certain rhythms settle into focus with the passing of time. The faces around me careen through adolescence and youth before collapsing into wrinkles and then finally disappearing. Each of these people imagines she is the same person day to day, but I can see how their lives rise and fall in cycles, moving through the same patterns as their ancestors, bricks in a city that is constantly being rebuilt.

  My only solace is in seeing Elena at her writing desk, fingers clasped around a fountain pen, dipping and scrawling her messages to great minds all over the world. It always reminds me of my first sight, the gentle contour of her porcelain cheek.

  More and more, glancing at her pages, I see sketches of the avtomat signs. Our late-night outings cease as she withdraws into obsession. Weeks pass when I don’t see her, our parlor thick with the pipe smoke of elderly scholars. Elena is a feral shadow in her library, lost behind desks heaped with inscrutable books written in elder languages.

  She is trying so hard to understand. I am trying so hard to ignore my call to pravda. We are both trying, and failing.

  Enduring the teeth-grinding ache of my daily routine, I begin to lay down plans. In secret letters, I open negotiations for a new, distant home—a manor house where Elena can live in opulent safety. Visiting recruitment parties put on by the army, I discuss joining the king’s martial force. Collecting supplies and making plans, I am able to do everything except discuss the subject with my sister.

  On our last day, I find Elena in her library sitting on a velvet cushion. Her bare feet are dangling over Persian rugs, sharp elbows propped on a little French desk. Eyes raking over the page, she scratches out a letter. Elena looks to me like some beautiful, angelic machine. We have not spoken in several weeks.

  I clear my throat, a human affectation.

  “Your friend Rousseau says children learn faster without their shoes on. Are you taking his advice?”

  The girl ignores me completely.

  “Who are you writing?” I ask.

  “You,” she responds, monosyllabic, eyes not leaving the page.

  “Me? Why not speak to me?”

  “I am writing as you,” she says, “to complete the purchase of a grand estate.”

  She taps the page, her hard fingertip knocking against wood veneer. Though my speech is still rusty with the soft vowels of Eastern Europe, the little one has adopted a precise, lilting English accent designed to put her visitors at ease.

  “You clearly needed my help negotiating,” she adds.

  Elena has discovered my offer to purchase a mansion far north of here. The secluded property will permanently separate us from the dangers of London. I notice she has also pulled out my army haversack and leaned it against the wall. Duty assignment papers are scattered on the floor.

  My hidden plans are, of course, transparent to her.

  “I see the structure is isolated,” she continues, not looking up. “No neighbors. Very little staff. I imagine it will simplify my life greatly and finally complete our great retreat from the world.”

  Standing over her shoulder, I scan the letter. She has negotiated a viciously low price. It seems the road to the estate has been in disrepair, some argument over who should maintain it, and it is difficult to get food transported there.

  Obviously, not a large concern of ours.

  “I should have told you,” I say.

  Stiffening, Elena looks up at me. Her eyes are two black wells of anger, face empty. A savage math is taking place behind her eyes. Her Word is logicka. In the mind of this little doll, the world is a sequence of cold mathematical equations, actions and reactions. It disturbs me to contemplate, but I must not forget the way she thinks.

  “Why, Peter?” she asks.

  “We must each follow our Word,” I say, speaking carefully. “It can be a burden, I know—”

  “You know?” She spits the word at me. “You’re free to go anywhere you like, to converse as equals with anyone. While I am trapped here in these apartments, in the body of a little girl. Writing letters with a man’s name on them.”

  I kneel beside her, eye to eye, thinking of Favorini’s workshop so long ago. I remember when my sister was a newly made doll, her eyes clicking with each blink. And now she is so venomous—such a livid and living creature.

  “I am not free,” I say. “My soul calls for justice, yet I cannot risk pursuing any. The city is a chaos of nepravda and there is nothing I can do. The orphans run in packs, Elena. Children as young as three.”

  “A consequence of the rules of this society.”

  “Logical to you, but it sets my Word alight in my chest. It…hurts me, Elena. It hurts my soul.”

  “Then you know how I feel, Peter,” she whispers, standing, watching me intensely. “It’s only logical to find others like us. Perhaps they could explain how our Words function? Perhaps they are older than we are, they might understand—”

  I back away from her desperate words.

  “I forbid it. You know this. The others will bring only death.”

  Or am I simply jealous, worried the others will steal her away?

  “Stop it!” she shouts, snatching up an ink pot and throwing it against the wall. Black streaks of liquid spray in a starburst against gilded wooden panels. “I tried to make you happy, but now I don’t care. Don’t you see I don’t care anymore? I don’t care if they kill us. I don’t want to live trapped like this.”

  Fists clenched, eyes shining, she stares fiercely up at me. Both of us know what she has said is not true—it violates logicka. The underlying logic of a living thing is its own survival.

  She can never disregard that.

  “The estate is ready, as you know,” I say, lifting the haversack to my shoulder. “You will be safe there. The staff are instructed to obey you. With my seal and letterhead, I am sure you can prepare the necessary documents while I am away.”

  She stares at me blankly.

  “Where?” she asks, a ragged edge to her voice.

  “India. A war has begun. King George is
mustering troops.”

  “And you plan to serve this new monarch, as you once served the tsar?”

  I nod.

  “I have enlisted as a soldier of fortune. I am pledged to the king.”

  Elena falls back into her desk chair. She turns away from me, then lifts the pen and continues to write her message. I watch her for a long time. She does not look up again. Finally, I leave her, sitting hunched at her desk, scribbling furiously, the nib of her fountain pen scratching black welts into the paper.

  25

  SEATTLE, PRESENT

  The far-off murmur of traffic permeates cool concrete walls around me. The unremarkable metal door has led us to an even less remarkable elevator, its rusty face visible in the dirty-orange glow of a single button. Peter presses it, leaving his finger for a long time. Finally, the thick metal doors part and we shuffle into a closet-size compartment, dead black walls lit by a sputtering fluorescent light.

  A row of steel buttons gleam, featureless as loose bullets.

  Struggling now, Peter leans against the elevator wall and studies the panel. His jacket and pants have been shredded by lead pellets and knife wounds, and a barely visible seam of stitches meanders down his face. Under this harsh light, with no blood or swelling, he looks like a hastily repaired mannequin.

  The steel doors close and I clench my teeth against a wave of claustrophobia.

  Peter’s fingers course over the elevator buttons in a complicated pattern, pressing and holding different spots for different amounts of time. Nothing changes as he enacts the routine. When he stops, nothing happens for a moment. Then I hear the mechanical thunk of the elevator motor engaging somewhere in the shaft.

  The floor drops out from under us.

  As we accelerate downward, Peter slumps against the wall and closes his eyes.

  “What’s wrong inside your chest?” I ask him. “You’re not telling me something.”

  He speaks without opening his eyes.

  “If my wound is fatal,” he says, “protect the relic and find its purpose. If Batuo offers his help, take it; otherwise…flee from here.”