Mainspring

by Jay Lake

  Another gate, the shadows deeper this time. Eyes gleamed within that darkness as well, large and yellow. Fangs glittered beneath some of those eyes, crystal knives waiting for Hethor and his escort.

  This time the guardians were real, or at least more real than before. The first rank of correct people shrieked. Some threw up their spears to ward their faces, but the mass pushed on through with dogged momentum. Eyes leered, fangs slashed, and a foetid breath, rank as the crocodile’s or the night wind off the salt jungle, blew through the gate. Hethor had the impression of some vast strength, a beast with a hundred heads coiling throughout the dark of the world; then they were back in another street.

  From here he could see the lighthouse. He knew that the harbor lay close to hand. The sorcerers and witches were spread out again along their line of retreat, no longer blocking the road as before. They seemed willing to let fear and darkness do their work.

  Arellya barked out another command, and the correct people picked up their pace. Hethor stumbled, but caught himself, and broke into a sprint. Though his legs were twice as long as theirs, they moved with an economy and strength that he could not match. His muscles burned.

  A last gate lay ahead, one more turn to reach the harbor and the escape of a boat or the airship. Even without the pursuing mob on their heels, Hethor would not have cared to remain anywhere near the city after dark. The great, terrible things that lived in the shadows would take form and pad the stone streets, hunting any who did not belong.

  He had a sudden vision of the city as a living creature, its daytime people no more than fevered dreams of the thinking stones, its nighttime terrors the true embodiment of the spirit of the place.

  Then they were in the gateway. Though they had passed through nothing like this on the way in, the tunnel was much longer than any of the other gates, the setting sun a gleaming, distant dot. An army of the shadow creatures stood between them and the sun, eyes and teeth gleaming, bodies just wavering into being.

  “Light,” Hethor shouted. “Run into the sun! They are only darkness!”

  With a ragged shout this time, the correct people again leveled their spears and charged the angry shadows.

  It was a terrible race, full of screaming and blood. Hethor’s heart seized with terror, his veins turning to ice as his boots changed to lead. This close to sunset, the monsters in the dark found their voices and roared like all the cougars of New England massed on a single hillside. It was worse than the sounds of the night jungle, worse even than the attack of the crocodile on the river, though no claw or tooth touched Hethor. Many of the correct people suffered.

  They must have hope, to reach the sun, Hethor thought furiously. His soul-magic had failed him with the crocodile, but he was the Messenger. “The heart of God,” he called out to the correct people, “is the heart of the world.”

  “Heart of the world!” they shouted back.

  “As man lives, so lives God.”

  “So lives God!”

  “As God lives, so lives the world.”

  “So lives the world!”

  The words seemed to have little effect on the shadow monsters, but they propelled Hethor’s feet and the steps of his little war band on toward the reddening sun, until they burst out onto the dockside. The breakwater stretched to their right, the docks and airship masts to their left. The sun was a receding glare touching down on the horizon, pressing the ocean down with its weight.

  Arellya raised her hand, and the correct people slowed. Hethor looked around. Where earlier they had been fifty and more, there were perhaps three dozen left. Malgus’ body still rode on their shoulders. Fifteen or so dead, in the race from the central plaza to here, and even outside the concentric walls they were still not safe. He stifled a sob.

  “The boats,” he called out. “To the boats.”

  Down the docks they ran, even the seemingly tireless correct people slowing with the burdens of their wounds and fear. Night was approaching with an almost audible rumble, the city’s denizens readying themselves to strike their greatest and final blow.

  The sun was a glimmering paring when the correct people reached the first of the moored ships. They were small, fishing boats or shallow scows, Hethor realized. He had no knowledge of sailing, and though the correct people were apt boatmen, they knew less than he did about the sea—their Great Salt River.

  Running on into the fall of night, they reached a larger ship, a wide-bottomed trader like a modern version of a European trading cog out of history. Too many sails, too many skills none of them understood.

  It had to be the airship, Hethor realized.

  The mooring masts were at the far end of the docks, and the sun was vanishing with an air of finality. “The trees,” Hethor said, “at the end of the road.” He had no correct people word for mast or dock.

  The fanged shadows boiled out behind them, howling for blood, their voices creaking with the sound of snapping bones. The fallen of Hethor’s own party seemed to be swept up in the pursuit, dead correct people on their trail, keening, crying, blaming. Rivers of red flowed rapidly across the stone dock in the twilight, slippery sticky blood overtaking their flight to make them trip and slide headfirst into stone bollards or pitch screaming into the sea.

  The first of the correct people reached the mast where the manta-shaped airship was moored. Startling a pale bird that had been roosting there, they swarmed up the mast much as they had swarmed up the pillar in the central plaza—in groups and ladders and chains, some on the rungs, some on the chain, some grasping the edges of the stone mast with panicked fingers and preternaturally agile feet.

  Hethor stopped and turned to look behind him. Though the reeking breath of shadow had been on his neck a moment before, rivers of blood tugging at his ankles, the dock was clear. It looked peaceful and deserted as it had when they first spied the city from the breakwater by the lighthouse.

  “No,” Hethor whispered. “You will not gull me with silence. You will not take me in the back.”

  He picked up a dropped spear, the haft of some wood so dark as to be black in the twilight, a bronze point gleaming even now. As the last few of the correct people flowed around him, Hethor swept the spear back and forth, seeking to block whatever followed.

  For a moment, despite his instincts, he felt foolish. Then the air seemed to thicken like a soup stock on the boil. He didn’t see the shadow monsters, but he felt them in the prickle of his hair, in the sickness of his gut. The gears-within-gears sense he had of hearing the universe was whirring loudly now, at a manic pace that threatened to strip the cogs of reality around him.

  Hethor stabbed out, and the bronze tip vanished into thin air. He jerked the spear back with a gout of thick, black blood flowing from an unseen wound. Switching his grip, Hethor swung the spear again, once more striking something. It was like dragging a knife on carpet. Still invisible, the monster was as wide as the docks on which it stood.

  He could not fight such a great thing, but he was slowing it. Hethor glanced over his shoulder at the mast. Malgus was rising upward, in a slow, steady parody of his fatal fall, the last of the correct people pushing the body from below. The sight reminded Hethor of so many furry roaches swarming a vast stone rope.

  No matter, he thought. They were up, they were safe—safe as they could be on the airship.

  He turned and stabbed again, the spear striking something so close Hethor could have reached out and touched it without a stretch. Time for him to go. Another hard stroke with the spear, this time leaving it hanging in the invisible monster, and he turned and raced to the mast.

  Once his back was turned, the ravening horrors returned to his mind, his ears, the prickling skin on the back of his neck. “You can be killed,” shouted Hethor, “and I left a spear in you to prove it!”

  Hand on rung, hand on the next rung. Climbing as he had within the gasbag of Bassett, mindful of the fatal dangers and moving as quickly as he could.

  Something grabbed his leg, a tentacle or
claw. Hethor tugged, trapped; then several spears showered past him from above and the grip broke. He sprang up the ladder again until hairy little hands pulled him onto a small platform where ropes led to the airship.

  “The great boat of air was empty of persons,” said one of the males. “Quickly, across the vines.”

  Though they were a hundred feet above the stone dock, Hethor scrambled along two of the ropes like a monkey in the jungle. His fearful days on Bassett were behind him, while the possibility of falling from the lines was the least of his troubles here.

  Another set of hands pulled him over the rail. A last few correct people followed Hethor. Lying on the deck, he looked up at Arellya and gasped, “How many?”

  “We have lost twenty-one. There are thirty-two left, plus you, me, and the dead navigator.” Though she did not seem angry, as a human would have, there was still a tension in her voice.

  “Cast off.” Realizing he had spoken in English, he said in the language of the correct people, “We must be free of the tree.”

  “Throw down the vines,” Arellya called out.

  The manta-shaped airship bobbed, then began to turn into the wind. Hethor wondered who was at the steering, then realized the unusual design of the gasbag was like the body of a bird—it would naturally face that way.

  Could they drift this night, while he and the correct people recovered from their run? Around him the little hairy men couched or sprawled on the deck, most tending wounds, all gasping for air, soaked with sweat.

  His sense of fear was gone, too. Hethor pulled himself up to the rail and looked overboard for the city of sorcerers and shadows.

  It was below him, drifting toward the stern of the airship. He could clearly see the circled walls, as the streets seemed to be glowing with the same fixed light as the lighthouse had. It was a vast eye scanning the night sky for sin and villainy.

  Or stolen airships, Hethor thought with a bitter smile.

  Unblinking, bright, armed with the terror of every childhood shadow, viewed from above, the eye of the city still seemed blind. It was a genius loci, Hethor realized, the power of a place that did not extend beyond its bounds.

  He badly wanted to drink some water, and then to sleep deeply, with a need as strong as any he’d ever felt. But this night brought one other duty first.

  “I will commend the navigator’s soul to God now,” he said to Arellya when he found her on the foredeck. “It is mine to do, but you and any of the correct people are welcome to join me.”

  Trembling with fatigue, she nodded. Another of the habits she’d learned from him.

  “I ONCE heard the headman of a boat of the air say that a great village of past times burned,” Hethor said to the assembled correct people. Wrapped in some hastily located silk from belowdecks, Simeon Malgus lay at his feet, three spears beneath him for a pall. Somehow “Rome burned” had sounded better in English.

  He went on.

  “The past times of my people are full of fire and fear. Villages and villages of villages fought one another, the way monkeys will fight for scraps. This even though my people dwell among riches.

  “The navigator was one of my people who heeded the word of more than one headman. Though all of us are free to follow different voices, it is thought poorly done to hear first this one then another by secret ways, pledging loyalty all the while. The navigator did these things.

  “He was still a good man.

  “The navigator treated me as you might treat a strange animal, or worse. He took my art from me, and destroyed it. He drove me away with shouts and threats, and avoided me thereafter.

  “He was still good to me.

  “At the last the navigator was set to be my guide against his will. He led me through a valley of danger, drove me over a cliff to fall forever through the sky, lost me and his own way, and came to death finally at my hands in a city of stones and magic.

  “He still showed me the way.”

  Hethor stopped, bile in his mouth and tears once again stinging his eyes. He wanted to shout, rail against Malgus and the poor judgment of the Jade Abbott in setting the man as Hethor’s guide. But was either of them wrong? Was Hethor wrong?

  Under the night sky and God’s brassy regard, he did not want to utter maledictions against the soul of Simeon Malgus. His words were not lies, his eulogy not a fraud. Just a way of thinking.

  “The navigator made my way possible. The navigator brought the Messenger to the correct people, though his methods seem strange to us. The navigator died with the name of God upon his lips.”

  A lie, thought Hethor, but the right lie.

  “With the navigator’s name on my own lips, Simeon Malgus in the tongue that he and I share, I consign him back to God, who first created him.”

  Hethor nodded, and six correct people stepped forward, took the spear handles, and sent Malgus’ body spinning into the blackness. Hethor stepped to the rail to study the starlit waters shimmering far below the airship. Though he watched a long time, and listened carefully, he never saw or heard a splash.

  Finally he looked up at the orbital tracks gleaming like brass threads in the night sky. The music of Creation was still loud in his ears, though back to normal from the chattering chaos of the dockside monster.

  “Thank you, Simeon Malgus,” Hethor told the stars.

  He found a place on the deck to sleep, trusting luck and decent weather to keep the airship in the sky until he woke to consider what to do next. Arellya stayed far away from him that night.

  TEN

  CLOUDS TRAILED themselves across the sky like regimented sheep marching to some distant war with the wolves. The Equatorial Wall loomed to the north, though it had already sunk noticeably toward the horizon since Hethor’s last view of it in the great stone city. The moon’s thread shone in the sky with Luna herself pale and blotchy amid the blue of the day. The sea below was patchy in color—irregular zones of purple, gray, blue, and where they passed closer to shore, the green of an old Mason jar. At this altitude, perhaps a thousand feet, the air was fresh and fine, scented of salt and sunlight.

  All in all, it was a glorious day. Especially since no mute mages or toothy shadows stalked them.

  Hethor stood at the stern of the stolen airship. A few of the young male correct people nearby watched him curiously. Since their escape the evening before, the ship had steered itself. As best as he could determine, their course had described a long loop out to sea during the night, and headed back toward shore with the dawn.

  Which seemed to make some sense, given his basic understanding of meteorology.

  The weather was good, the trim of the ship was stable, and he was in no hurry to find new ways to drop himself out of the sky. Besides, even if he had known how to control the ship, Hethor had yet to set a course.

  Dark shapes swirled in the air farther out to sea. Whether they were gulls, albatrosses, or something larger and strange, he had no way to tell. Still, the distant fliers prompted Hethor to think on the archangel Gabriel and Hethor’s duties to Heaven.

  “I still know nothing of the Key Perilous,” he told his scattered onlookers, “even after all this time and trouble. But the Mainspring I could perhaps find.”

  The Earth orbited on brass tracks—a ring gear of planetary dimensions. The planet had an axis of rotation. That meant that there had to be a spring coiled around that axis to drive the rotation. The axis, of course, would meet the surface at the poles.

  Hethor knew very little of the pole of Northern Earth, and absolutely nothing of the Southern Pole, except for the presumption that it was icy as well. But he knew perfectly well where it lay. The coastline below him ran roughly southward. If he could find the tiller of this airship and drive it to his whim, he would head south as well, making for the ice that surely lay at the bottom of the world in frigid mirror to the top.

  Which meant he had a course to set after all, Key Perilous or no. Perhaps there was another way to fulfill his quest.

  With that thought
, Hethor began to walk the deck. What was the motive force for this airship? Though the gasbag was shaped like a wing of sorts, there were no spars or sails. Nor did he see engine nacelles such as Bassett had employed with her compact yet productive steam power plants. He walked along the starboard rail, noting that the bag was much closer to the deck than Bassett’s had been. There were struts rising every eight feet or so, multiple connections each lighter than the stout masts of his former ship, each carrying a smaller load.

  This airship had a clearer deck as well. It was devoid of the rope lockers, lines, and shrouds that had hung Bassett like a wood-bellied fighting ship of Admiral Nelson’s fleet. More evidence, Hethor thought, that sails weren’t simply stored away.

  He reached the bow not much wiser. There he turned to head aftward again along the port side. By this time he trailed a whole parade of idle correct people—not jeering as the folk of his native New Haven would have done, nor questioning, just following. They were possessed of a wide-eyed curiosity that opened their small hairy faces so that his entourage resembled a mute choir of unfortunately hirsute children.

  At midships, he stopped. There was a grumbling or hissing noise audible there, that he’d missed on his walk forward. Hethor leaned against the rail and stuck his head over the edge. The noise grew neither louder nor softer. He looked up along the strut nearest him and began inspecting closely for access to the gasbag.

  There was a little section with separate, laced hems two struts aft of his position.

  Hethor removed his belt and shoes. Unlike the access aboard Bassett, there was no ladder here. Rather he reached just over his head and unlaced a square of the gasbag material. It was not so different from the gutta-percha coated canvas of Bassett’s gasbag. Hethor pulled it open to peer inside.

  Apparently one simply swarmed along within to wherever it was one wanted to go. There was no rope ladder inside, nor any obvious means of access except by exercising the main force of his arms to lever upward. Hethor reached in, steeled himself, and began to pull up, when he suddenly found that he was floating.