Mainspring

by Jay Lake

  These were a true mockery of God’s angels.

  Then the mockery was over the rails in a wave of a dozen or more. They whirled like fire dancers, brass swords gleaming in the morning light, and passed among the lines and shrouds like so many great moths drawn to slam into the ship’s company. They swung their blades, and some drew bows to send arrows into the row of sailors and marines still firing upon them.

  None of the winged savages so much as shouted, let alone said a word. All fought in eerie silence save for the clash of arms.

  Lacking a weapon, Hethor scrambled to the forward rope locker. There he pulled out a pry bar intended for levering the winches as they were mounted and dismounted. He was no fighter, but it might serve to keep one of those brilliant, flashing swords at bay. And woe betide the winged savage he could swing at from behind.

  Despite his prudent thoughts, Hethor waded screaming into the fight, slipping on blood and gore, almost tripping as his right foot rolled away from someone’s severed hand. The pry bar made a whooshing noise as he swung it to connect with a winged savage’s arm with a crackling like a snapped branch. He pulled it over his head and whacked another one on the muscled mass that enclosed its wing joints, between and just below the shoulder blades.

  Al-Wazir was next to him. The ropes chief bayoneted a savage as he grinned through a blood-splashed face. He shouted something to Hethor, who only heard the word “right,” then swung about to help Dairy, who had been fighting the whole time from a seat on the deck and now seemed to be missing at least one arm.

  Hethor laid in again with his pry bar, feeling something slick slide off his arm just before a spray of blood erupted. He glanced that way to see the Jerseyman dying, the man’s half-toothed grin collapsing in pained surprise as his body separated from shoulder to waist in a fountain of blood and offal.

  So Hethor turned again, still swinging, though his palms stung terribly. He felt beaten, bruised, but not sliced. Somewhere nearby Smallwood shouted as pistols crackled. More carbine fire popped. At that point Hethor realized that he was completely surrounded by the winged savages. He was alone in a circle of them.

  Swords poked out at him, not killing blows. They were trying to force him to drop the pry bar.

  Hethor held it out in front of him, two-handed like he might have pulled on a line. “Oh, no,” he shouted. “Not like Malgus!”

  He saw Dr. Firkin, covered in a bloody apron, shouting at him. The surgeon seemed to be waving Hethor on. Then, grinning their rotten-toothed grins, the winged savages moved closer in, until one of them managed to grab his pry bar on the left extension of its swing. After that their hands were all over Hethor. They grabbed, pinched, the horrible ragged nails cutting into him. It was like his nightmares of the candlemen.

  And worst of all, they still made no sound other than their breathing. No shouts, no curses, no taunts.

  “By the white bird … ,” Firkin yelled, still waving Hethor onward, but the winged savages rushed Hethor toward the rail and threw him over. They dove after him, taking two marines and Midshipman Fine with them in their wave of flesh. Hethor screamed as loud and shrill as the loblolly boy had, terrified of the fall and more terrified of the savages. Two of them folded their wings and dove after him, grabbing Hethor by arms and legs. They swung him between them as their wings beat for altitude.

  He watched the other three from Bassett fall screaming down the bay of the vertical city as a last few rounds of gunfire pursued Hethor and his captors. Moments later they were winging through open air, almost peaceful save for the cruel hands nearly breaking his ankles and wrists. In addition, the weight of his own body conspired to disjoint his knees and elbows.

  Somewhere in the first stages of shuddering flight, Hethor forgot his fear long enough to feel a great pang of regret for the golden tablet. God’s word had been sent to him and him alone. It now lay abandoned in a chart drawer that would not be opened for months to come. Nor indeed, ever opened at all, if Bassett did not manage a return to a friendly port.

  He twisted his head to look over his shoulder, down into the vast, endless pit. The winged savages were moving so fast that even the massive gasbag that made up the bulk of Bassett looked like nothing more than a leaf floating on a dark pond from the increasingly higher vantage toward which he was being lifted.

  SIX

  HE SWUNG free in the chill air of the evening. The pain in his arms and legs stretched in his mind like ropes fraying to the point of separation. Hethor was lost in his suffering—frightened, lonely, keenly aware that he would most likely never see Bassett again. The savages who had taken him had been flying for hours, well into twilight’s gleam. The airship was long lost to sight, as was the vertical city.

  He’d never meant to be a sailor, but Hethor would miss them—the dead and living. And so much had been left behind. The golden tablet, most of all, but other answers, too. What had Dr. Firkin been trying to tell him? His life seemed already forfeit. How much else had he lost?

  Hethor spent time in fruitless contemplation of that question as they rose further into the evening. His captors flew very fast, though the beats of their wings were lazy enough. It was as though they were borne on the invisible hands of God. In the gathering twilight, Hethor could see lights on the face of the Wall—campfires, perhaps, or settlements, though he was hard-pressed to tell what exactly they might be. Some flickered—his captors perhaps flying over a sheltering forest. Others gleamed as hard and bright as good English electricks.

  As night finally settled full on, the winged savages chose a ledge on which to alight. It was relatively narrow, perhaps twice the width of a cart track. The flat stone vanished into darkness before Hethor could spy either end. He had no doubt the only way off was into the open air. His captors were far too cunning to choose a site that would leave them vulnerable to attack by enemies or animals.

  He had no doubt these man-beasts had enemies.

  An even dozen of the savages settled onto their ledge. They wrapped themselves in their great, ragged wings and went to sleep. Not a word was exchanged, no meal was shared—nothing that would substantiate the kinship with man so broadly hinted by their bodies and faces.

  Remaining firmly seated on stone, Hethor scooted over to the edge of his little territory. It was sharply defined, sheared clean off by some slide or breakage. The image of an undercut beneath the ledge kept him from the very precipice. Still, he sat close, trailing his fingers through pebbles and looking north across a sea of clouds that roofed the Bight of Benin and the African coast.

  He reckoned on being at least three miles above the sea, maybe five, but there was no noticeable thinness in the air like the sailors had spoken of in their tales of high-flying airship battles with the Chinese. It was the Wall, of course. Whatever energy of Creation God had put into raising this support for His gears had encompassed the thickness of the air.

  Why?

  Surely a vacuum would have sufficed.

  The answer came to Hethor: so that men could live upon the Wall, or even at the top. Why, he was not so sure. Perhaps to be closer to God.

  The thought of men caused Hethor to look over his shoulder and make a small study of his captors.

  They were so much like Gabriel in their form, though the horrid tattoos and stringy bodies were a crude echo of the angel’s perfection. These savages also seemed mute as fish, in contrast to Gabriel, or Hethor himself. Hethor wondered how they communicated. What passed between them to exchange the skills of combat, or sword smithery? Were there winged mothers somewhere mouthing silent lullabies to rude little cherubs in their stone cradles?

  A thought struck him. Man was made in the image of God. The winged savages seemed to be fashioned in the image of the angels—a lesser Creation in an imitation of a lesser model.

  He stared across the starlit sea of clouds for a long time, ignoring the rumbling hunger in his gut, and wondered what the golden tablet had signified.

  DAWN AND a thicket of rustling noises brought w
akefulness to Hethor. He’d slept through the midnight rattle high above, as well as ignoring his hunger and the persistent ache in his arms, legs, and bladder. He looked around.

  He was still perched upon the ledge. So were the dozen winged savages. They were spreading their pinions wide to warm them in the morning sun. That explained the rustling noise. For the moment his captors were ignoring him.

  Hethor crawled to the rim of the ledge, keeping his weight as far back as possible in case the imagined overhang was real. Peering over, he saw no cliff or rock angling forward just below him. Some distance down was an apron of meadow, dotted with pale spots that might be sheep, or mountain goats. The Wall spread gradually outward from the field, acquiring a bit of slope until it eventually met the sea in a gleaming line far below.

  Four of his captors sprinted over the edge. They snapped their wings wide to circle for a few moments before folding them again to drop into a dive. Hethor watched them plunge the thousand feet or more to the meadow. The lead savage snatched one of the grazing animals right off the ground. The others flew guard as the hunter’s wings beat hard, straining to bear the prey upward the same way that two of them had carried him the night before.

  The sheep was deposited onto the ledge still bleating its terror. One of the other winged savages dispatched it with a sword blow to the neck. They fell upon the poor beast, tearing with fingers and mouths in a whirling mass of wool and blood and sloppy purple-red fragments.

  Hethor turned away, his stomach churning. He could do nothing to shut out the slurping and crunching noises that continued for some time behind him. We eat them too, he thought.

  Then two of the winged savages grabbed his arms, leaving bloody prints on his canvas shirt, and hauled Hethor to his feet. One of them handed him a bundle of bloody rope—no, tendons from the unlucky sheep—before making circling motions around its own waist.

  He stared at the slimy, warm things flopping within his fist. What was it they wanted?

  The winged savage slapped his hand—lightly, not to hurt—and made the same motions, followed by a mime of lifting.

  Harness. They wanted a harness with which to carry him. It would be a less tiring method for them to fly him away. Hethor doubted it was out of any particular concern for his comfort. These creatures had been charged to deliver him somewhere, reasonably intact.

  At least they weren’t going to eat him like that poor sheep.

  He had no idea if the tendons would hold raw and uncured, but given the way the winged savages had chased and caught him after tossing him overboard from Bassett, perhaps that didn’t matter. He was far past the point of being horrified about falling—everything that was happening now was no less frightening than the prospect of another fall.

  The tendons knotted together to about five feet in length. He would need three or four times that to form even a simple bosun’s chair. Hethor gestured with his arms spread wide, showed them the bloody rope, then held up three fingers. Three more spreads of his arms.

  The one who had handed him the tendons simply stepped sideways several paces and fell off the ledge, followed by several more.

  They were back shortly with more clusters of sheep tendons. At least Hethor assumed they were sheep tendons. He tried not to imagine the scene in the meadow below. Taking the wretched, bloody things in hand, he set to making his ropes and from them his chair.

  THEY WERE airborne, sweeping past a land of rubble and stunted trees. Hethor felt ill, having slaked his thirst on sheep’s blood. That was not a good substitute for water. He hung between four of the savages, roped about his legs and chest with the stretching, bloody mess.

  Looking at the ravaged country, it seemed to Hethor as though a great battle had been fought. Several times he saw creatures lumbering through the rubble. They were enormous things that gleamed of brass and crystal, but they never turned their barrel-shaped heads toward him.

  The monsters were hunting each other, he presumed, until he saw the column of men.

  From his vantage among his captors, Hethor could not make out many details. He tried anyway. There looked to be hundreds and hundreds of them. They were spread out along a trail through the rubble. A team of mules dragged some light artillery at the tail of the column. Squinting hard, Hethor could see men hastily digging farther up.

  A firing point, he thought, in their defense against the brass-and-crystal machines.

  “Ahoy!” he screamed, releasing his grip on the slick ropes of his harness to cup his hands, though that threatened to pitch him forward over the abyss. “Ahoy there!”

  Two of the winged savages jerked the ropes they carried. Hethor looked up into their angry black eyes. They might not talk, but they certainly had ideas, he realized.

  He considered screaming again but decided not to. Dangling over so many miles of open air, his options were limited.

  The winged savages swept upward past the column. At the head, Hethor saw a Union Jack on a staff—an enormous battle flag being carried in the van. Just ahead of the flag were more soldiers firing their weapons up the hill as another of the brass-and-crystal monsters shambled down their trail. It seemed unaffected by the efforts at defense.

  The world lurched with a grinding noise that rang inside Hethor’s head as loudly as if a gear had stripped itself while still in his hands. Everything below stopped for a moment, men and monsters alike. Clouds of dust billowed up from the surrounding rubble. The Wall emitted a groan deep as a wounded beast the size of an entire world.

  Hethor watched, his mouth frozen open, as the entire landscape of rubble and trees began to slip. A full section of the Wall was giving way, he realized. The hunting machines felt it first, swaying with their height; then a ripple of panic spread through the men in Gordon’s column, their reaction visible even from Hethor’s vantage.

  The winged savages had beaten their way above this battlefield, but Hethor continued to stare as the land slipped away beneath him. The moving surface was but a flake off the Wall, though it looked to be forty or fifty miles wide and several miles high. It was like watching Long Island vanish.

  The slide began to fold in on itself. Rocks and dust washed over the scrambling men and the machines that persecuted them, until everything was lost in a great cloud of gray. He glanced up to see towers toppling from a higher ledge, more brass and crystal like the hunting machines, shattering as they fell. Their destruction sent brass collars and domes spinning in the air, giant missiles that weighed tons.

  Was the entire Wall slipping away?

  Was the entire world slipping away?

  He closed his eyes, grabbing tighter to the bloody ropes that bound him, unable to look. He let the roar of millions of tons of stone engulf him as surely as it had the men of Gordon’s column.

  Except that he could fly away. All they could do was be crushed or fall.

  Still the savages flew upward and upward, while Hethor listened to the clattering of the Earth stutter, then right itself, only to stutter again. The Mainspring was indeed troubled, he thought. How far was he from the Key Perilous, and Gabriel’s mission?

  Climbing ever higher into the sky, Hethor wept for longer than he cared to keep count of.

  THEY FLEW past wonders, Hethor and his captors, so many that the sights became commonplace.

  A city carved out of a looming cliff face in the form of dozens of standing men. Each had a sloped forehead and enormous nostrils, tiny windows and balconies all about their bodies.

  Fresh scars on the Wall from the earthquakes, long tails of destruction below them. Tongues of smoke and steam hissing from cracks in the erased landscape. Even once, what Hethor thought were enormous snakes or giant, sinuous lizards that must have hatched beneath the stone.

  A forest of trees, each taller than any he had ever imagined, like masts for a ship of giants. Their tops burned in apparent perpetuity, while flaming birds circling the roiling orange mass.

  Glaciers hanging in dark clefts, overrun with furry beasts that seemed to glo
w within their shadows. Larger, dimmer glows were embedded in the darkest regions of the cleft behind them.

  He tired first of cataloging them. Eventually, he even tired of witnessing them. He dropped to sleep, until he was eventually awoken by being thumped onto stone.

  This was another ledge, narrower than the first. The air did feel somehow thinner and colder here, though Hethor still seemed to be in no danger of freezing. It was close to dusk once more. He glanced up to see a brassy gleam in the vertical horizon above him. Their angle continued to grow narrower, the horns of the orbital track widening to a line.

  They were approaching the gears, then.

  He turned to look out and down. The view made him gasp for breath. Hethor collapsed onto the ground and scooted to place his back against the stone of the Wall.

  The Earth curved away below him, as if to replace the lost curve of the horns of brass in the sky. Clouds dotted the ocean like the sheep had dotted the meadow that morning. He could see the shimmery blue of daylight down there. Yet when he raised his eyes, he saw stars surrounding the moon’s track, which in turn gleamed bright as he’d ever known it. Hethor thought he might reach out and touch it.

  This was what the eyes of God saw. Or at least the view granted to His angels.

  Hethor’s gut, empty for a day, rebelled, seeking level ground and a safely familiar horizon. He leaned over to choke out the bile, the heaves in his stomach and chest preoccupying him even as his throat and nose stung. Finally, Hethor found himself studying the tiny insects that crawled among the stones of the ledge.

  Anything but looking out at that terrible view again.

  He leaned away from the puddle of his spew, curled tight against the rock wall, and shivered into night’s darkness. Hethor wept for the men and lands that had died and wondered when his turn would come.