Mainspring

by Jay Lake

  There were rings of walls, walls within walls partially visible because of the high arched gates that opened between them. Towers of construction very similar to the lighthouse scraped toward the sky. Some were topped with orreries or great wheels of brass in apparent imitation of God’s design for the cosmos.

  These towers within the walls had windows cut into them, though few and widely spaced. The effect was that of a race of giant children who had built with crude blocks, rather than the rational designs of man.

  Only the harbor looked familiar. The sheltered water hosted a dozen sailing and steamships, and three airship masts. One of the airship masts was occupied, though by an airship of a design completely alien to Hethor’s admittedly limited experience. Its gasbag was narrow and wide, almost like a manta ray’s body. The hull beneath seemed shallow and wide to match. It stood peacefully at the mast, though Hethor imagined just from the shape that it would be quite fast. He also noted that unlike Bassett, it had no steering oars or stuns’l spars.

  He was not here about ships. He was here to find Simeon Malgus. Hethor turned to Arellya and the other correct people, who were seated, staring across the breakwater at the harbor and the city.

  “We have died,” one of the males said. “This is a place beyond the world.”

  “I have never imagined a village so big,” said another.

  “Or even stones of such a size,” added a third.

  “This is as great as any of the cities of men where I come from, beyond the Wall,” Hethor said. The correct people’s language had no word for Northern Earth. “But still, these are just men. I mean to enter the city and search for the guide I lost before I met you.”

  “You could spend a lifetime looking through such huts,” Arellya said.

  “Well, yes.” Hethor didn’t really want to consider that too carefully. “But I think it will be easier than that. I found him once before, atop the Wall, the previous time when I thought I had lost him.”

  “And you claim that he is the guide?”

  There was something dangerous about correct people logic, Hethor decided. “Let us be on our way, then.”

  “This is truly the stone road,” said one of the correct people.

  “Truly,” they all murmured.

  IT WAS not hard to enter the city—the walls, while high and steep, were unguarded. The gateways lacked even gates to shut. These people did not fear, Hethor realized. Perhaps their walls were there more because some among the inhabitants believed a city should have walls than because they needed them for any particular reason. Ornaments for a metropolis.

  The breakwater led them to a boulevard that passed through one of the empty gates; then they were among the people of the city, Hethor and his whole crowd of correct people.

  These folk were impossibly tall, legs like storks’ with arms to match, their bodies thin as knives. None of them were as short as six feet, and Hethor would have put most of them closer to eight. Their skin was coffee-dark, their features their own rather than resembling any race Hethor had ever seen. Noses were long and angled, ears had enormous lobes, and their brows were ridged as if all of them frowned with the labor of constant great thought.

  They were all dressed in fabrics of a hundred colors. Each robe or sash or blouse was dyed to shame any rainbow. Most of the colors jarred the eye, inharmonious compositions laid over contradictory essays in hue and tone. There were animal skins and chains and other accessories in abundance, and most carried thuribles or wands, as a gypsy fortune-teller might.

  Hethor even saw one fellow of middling height, about seven feet, made up with a white face and ruffed tunic, looking like nothing so much as a clown, walking a goat on a leash. Others had animals as well. Familiars, perhaps.

  Every man was a sorcerer, every woman a witch. What else could they be? Not a single one of them seemed to notice Hethor or the correct people. This was beyond haughtiness or indifference—though no one collided with them, none made eye contact, none stared, none stopped them to ask what they were about.

  Hethor could not even imagine walking the streets of New Haven or Boston with a mob of hairy little men carrying spears. There would be riots or arrests, or both, in very short order. Here, they might as well have been ghosts.

  The strangest thing was that the clicking sound of gears, Hethor’s gift from his deafness, was almost overwhelming with these sorcerer-folk. Among the correct people, he only heard the inner sounds at the height of emotion and sensory stimulation or on the edge of sleep. Here, just walking down the smooth-slabbed street, each of the witches and sorcerers he passed thundered like the works of a church steeple clock in need of lubrication.

  Either the residents of this city were much closer to God or much farther away from God than most folk. Hethor would wager on distance, not nearness, but perhaps that was just his prejudice.

  “These are a strange race,” Arellya said to him. “They make even you seem ordinary.”

  He had to laugh, though somehow, she pained his heart at the same time.

  THEY SEARCHED through the city most of the rest of the day, weaving their way through the circled walls and towering gates.

  “What if we are lost?” Hethor asked at one point, looking down yet another curving street of oversized brown buildings.

  “Correct people do not lose their way,” said Arellya. “If we walk somewhere, we can always walk back.”

  “I’m glad some of us can do that,” Hethor muttered.

  The inattention of the residents continued to grate on him. It really did seem as if Hethor and the correct people were walking dead. Did this foretell some horrible doom at dusk, as in an E. A. Poe story? Or perhaps it was something else, some aspect of their bodies and their minds, strange physiologies suitable for life under the African sun and the practice of magic.

  Not that he really believed in magic. But Hethor had seen, and done, too many strange and wondrous things the past few months since leaving home to be so certain of his doubts, either.

  In the late afternoon the party made their way into the city center, where there was a great square. More accurately a round, as it were. This was bordered by the smallest stone structures Hethor had seen so far in the city, low-walled rectangles that looked as though they might have been intended for market booths or stalls, though there was no market here.

  A few dozen of the local citizenry passed through the square, colorful as ever. Just like the rest of the city there seemed to be no idlers. All of these magical folk walked briskly on their missions, having scarcely more time or recognition for each other than they did for their uninvited visitors.

  At the center of the square was a pillar shaped much like the lighthouse, though smaller, perhaps fifty feet in height. Chains dangled down its sides. At the top a man was bound.

  Simeon Malgus, Hethor realized with a chill in his heart. He knew now where the navigator had landed in his fall from Heaven.

  “There is my guide,” he told Arellya, pointing upward.

  “Do you plan to follow him there?”

  “No.” Hethor’s mouth set, grim and firm. “Is there any way to fetch him down?”

  “Certainly.”

  Arellya went into a whispered conference with the other correct people. The males gestured and made hand signs. The whole group of them except for her scampered away, swarming about the base of the tower.

  Hethor watched in some amazement as the correct people formed a mass, climbing on one another’s backs and shoulders, until the leaders could reach the hanging chains. They shifted to a sort of hairy-man ladder that would be the envy of any troupe of acrobats, and passed some of their smaller members up to the top.

  The result of this effort was that four correct people stood around Malgus on the crown of the pillar. Each carried a flint or bronze knife with him. They went to work undoing his chains, breaking the bonds by dint of slow, careful effort rather than the brute force that was lacking from both their materials and their slight frames.


  Some minutes passed; then Malgus was handed over the edge. They lowered him past the stone talons of the top of the tower and into the arms of the correct people straining just below.

  But his weight was too much. Hethor watched with dawning horror as the acrobatic ladder swayed, correct people scrabbling for purchase against the stone or grasping onto the chains.

  The collapse came with the awful inevitability of the toppling of some forest giant. Correct people leapt or fell away from the tower as Malgus slid free. Tumbling as he fell, his body took one horrible bounce on the stone.

  Hethor sprinted toward the tower base while correct people screeched and thumped down onto the plaza. Some of the hairy men seemed seriously injured, but Hethor’s only focus was on Simeon Malgus.

  Malgus had landed just against the base of his prison-pillar, lying on his left side facing out. His left arm was folded out of sight behind him, in what had to be a horrible fracture. His legs lay unnaturally still. They did not even shiver like the rest of him. Blood seeped from his nose and pooled at the lower corner of his mouth. His rounded face was drawn and chapped, and when his lids fluttered, Malgus’ brown eyes seemed clouded.

  “My apprentice comes,” Malgus said in a weak voice. He gave a shuddering gasp. Then, “Ill met, Hethor.”

  “Navigator Malgus.” Hethor reached down, took the dying man’s right hand. It shuddered. Even within the skin Hethor could feel a movement that seemed to correspond to the gears-within-gears sounds he had been hearing. He had an intense sensation of Malgus as nothing more—or less—than an assemblage of tiny machines, tinier machines within them.

  “You are a fool,” Malgus said, his eyes fluttering shut again.

  “I have killed you when I meant to save you.” Hethor turned Malgus’ hand over within his own, his heart banded tight with pain. “I am the fool.”

  Malgus’ breath hissed hollow and loud like a bellows within his chest. He ignored Hethor. Around them, correct people keened and chattered over their wounded. Speaking English to Malgus, Hethor found the language of his helpers to be just so many clicks and whistles again.

  “Nothing is … ,” Malgus began, then stopped. He opened his eyes. “Do not believe.”

  “Believe what?”

  “You take the … clockwork of the universe … as evi … evidence of God’s plan.” Malgus’ breath hissed some more as he fought pain and gathered strength to speak again. “It shows only … the mechan … istic universe. Uncaring. An illusion. Even the Clockmakers have turned … their faces … from the world.”

  “You and I crossed the gear atop the Equatorial Wall,” Hethor said, almost wringing Malgus’ hand in his. “That was no illusion.”

  “God’s love. God’s plan.” Malgus tried to sit up. “Your belief will doom you. Trust William of Ghent. The white bird. It … he … he … he will call back our—” Malgus coughed, then vomited blood.

  William of Ghent? Too late for that man. For good or ill, Hethor had struck a blow against the sorcerer, though he doubted a fall into the brass had killed such a powerful man. More the pity that was. “What of William?”

  Malgus’ breath heaved; then his body stilled. A little brass spring popped from his mouth to strike the stones with a high ringing before it rolled to a stop in a pool of the navigator’s blood.

  Arellya squatted next to Hethor. “Your guide is dead.” Her whistling clicks coalesced into language for him even as she spoke.

  “Yes.” He still held Malgus’ hand, which was already cooling. He was afraid to think overmuch on what the spring meant.

  A mechanistic universe was the ultimate extension of Rational Humanism, excluding the absent God, or even His indirect agency in the form of the Clockmakers. It was the most arrant heresy to think that the gears that drove the world were in no wise of God.

  Wasn’t it?

  Arellya tugged on Hethor’s arm. “We should go.”

  Hethor looked up, his eyes blurred and peppered by tears. Around the edges of the plaza, the tall, proud sorcerers and witches of the cyclopean city paused in their circlings. The locals, who had before gazed through Hethor like so much air, now stared at him and his correct people as if they were live coals on a sitting room carpet.

  “The harbor,” said Hethor. “There is no help for me here. Either the Jade Abbott was mistaken, or Malgus was.” Alternatively, Malgus had turned traitor—the name of William of Ghent the last words on the late navigator’s tongue. “No matter. There are no Sages of the South who will advise me.”

  “To the harbor we shall go,” Arellya replied. “But we must move soon.” She called the young males together. Two were badly injured in their fall from Malgus’ pillar of punishment, several more limping and stumbling. “Kiklo and Barshee must be carried. The rest of you ready your spears. We take the fighting road back to the harbor.”

  Hethor stirred. “Malgus. We must take Malgus. Hero or traitor, I will not leave him lie here.”

  “This is a strange and wondrous place,” Arellya said, urgency in her voice for the first time since Hethor had come to understand her speech. “In death he will be strange and wondrous. We must move fast, Messenger.”

  “Malgus and I are not correct people,” Hethor said, picking his words carefully even among the rattling of spears as the young males formed up around him and Arellya. “God has asked us to care for our souls in our own way. I will bury him, and say a memorial prayer.”

  Arellya held his gaze for a moment. She then shrugged and counted off four more males to carry Malgus’ body.

  Running in a mob, they jogged toward the gated exit from the market. The folk of the city lined up along the route Hethor and the correct people must take, but did not move to interfere.

  We made this thing happen, Hethor thought. Our choices continue to drive us forward. He did not rightly know what they would do upon reaching the harbor. Take to a ship, perhaps, or even that airship, though he despaired of working any such vessel with this correct person mob trying to serve as crew.

  They passed out the gate and into one of the curving streets. The correct people headed left without hesitation. Hethor was unsure of even that choice. Glancing back, he saw Malgus’ body following him, chest high as the dead navigator rode on the shoulders of the correct people. Beyond Malgus and the last bobbing spears, the tall sorcerers followed. Their pursuers poured out of the gate at a quick pace that managed to still seem unhurried.

  Hethor could have sworn he had never seen this street before, that this combination of buildings and alleys and tall, narrow doors was novel, but he had to believe Arellya and her people. They jogged, humming in time to their steps, all of them watchful.

  The next massive gate approached on their right. The sun was westering over the ocean. Hethor’s little band ran through blocks of shadow from the taller buildings. This gate’s passage lay in deeper shadow, and as they turned into it, Hethor thought for a moment he saw the gleam of watchful eyes waiting in that temporary darkness. But they passed through unmolested, though the locals following behind continued to swell in numbers.

  Running down the next avenue, Hethor sensed the pace of the correct people faltering.

  “What is it?” he asked Arellya.

  “The gates have moved,” she said. “We will keep following this road, for there is no other.”

  The gates have moved? How was that possible? The whole city was built in circles, like an archery target, but it seemed inconceivable that it could somehow rotate on the central axis.

  Sorcerers, Hethor thought. He had already been convinced they were sorcerers and magicians in this city. This was proof that eldritch power was at work here.

  Another gate loomed on their left, this one completely unfamiliar to Hethor. Arellya and the young males took the turn without hesitation. These shadows were even darker, filled with sufficient menace to give the correct people pause, though even as they missed a step or two, they surged on through. The gateways were ten paces wide, enough for the group of them t
o pass, but still a funnel to choke and slow their progress.

  Nothing substantive lurked there either, but a mob of the locals waited on the next street to block their passage left. Arellya swung right instead. Another mob waited there. She did not break her stride, but shouted something Hethor found unintelligible. The young males lowered their spears and bent their bodies, racing to surge around Hethor and Arellya to place them in the center of the correct people’s charge, next to Malgus’ body.

  The sorcerers and witches were still silent, silent as the stones of their city, and their line stood unflinching as the correct people charged. Hethor wanted to shut his eyes, to hear the eerily quiet rush forward, the slapping of hairy feet on stone opposed only by the faint rustling of robes, counterpointed by the combined clockwork of a thousand hearts. The sight made his heart quail. The silence terrified him. He expected to hear the shrieking and screaming that any European charge would have entailed.

  The correct people met the sorcerers’ line, spears flashing off a brilliant glare, the first few of the hairy men screeching and collapsing. Their momentum carried them through a sheet of fire more like lightning than flame.

  The stench of burning hair and coppery blood flooded Hethor’s nostrils even as he stumbled over bodies large and small.

  The mob flowed backward, away from their line of advance, the correct people still not slowing their pace. Hethor knew they were lost, that the moving walls or gates had defeated even the unerring sense of direction of Arellya’s people. But he could not tell that from the behavior of those around him.

  Four, perhaps five, correct people had fallen at the hands of the sorcerers’ fire. The rest seemed unconcerned, almost as if they had not noticed. They had not lost hope. Hethor had been told why this was, how they saw death, but still he did not understand it. He continued to run with them though his lungs were beginning to burn and his legs ached with the pace.