Mainspring

by Jay Lake

  The winged savages grinned and tumbled over the rail where Hethor could not follow. With a sickened suspicion, he spun around to face the starboard rail. A moment later a group of the fliers appeared like mechanical jacks parading the hour before a cathedral clock. They immediately began to cut at the stanchions on that side.

  Hethor glanced over the rail. The moon was only a glow in the north, providing vague illumination. A thousand feet or more of air lay between him and the killer snow.

  He had never seen a parachute on this airship.

  “We are lost,” he called, letting his spear drop to the deck.

  A small crowd of correct people huddled around him. Their wounds steamed in the chilly air. The airship was suddenly quiet, except for the harsh breathing of the winged savages as they continued to hack at the stanchions.

  The deck lurched again, dropping Hethor to his knees. The correct people swayed like treetops in the wind.

  Hethor set his mind to the wheels that lay hidden behind everything in the world. He set his mind to God’s clockwork and the miracle of brass and design that kept the Earth spinning round the life-giving sun.

  “The heart of God is the heart of the world,” he said.

  The correct people muttered along with him, picking up the prayer. The gears clicked in his head, loud as ever.

  “As man lives, so lives God.”

  The winged savages left off their hacking and sawing to stare at Hethor, so many long-muscled killers suddenly at their rest.

  “As God lives, so lives the world.”

  The savages leapt over the rail in a single wave of flesh and were gone.

  Hethor breathed a heavy sigh of relief, immediately regretting it as his throat was seared anew by the cold. He and his followers stood in silence for a moment, torn between relief and horror at the sight of so much blood, so many bodies, so much life lost in the night.

  The deck lurched once more, nearly spilling them all over the rail in a wingless counterpoint to the sudden departure of the airship’s attackers. There was a rattling noise from above as one of the quiet engines strained at the shifting load before it surrendered with a horrendous roar that bespoke futility of repair. The deck lurched again, and Hethor’s stomach rebelled as the airship lost altitude far too fast.

  “We die now,” said one of the correct people, echoing Hethor’s own horrified thoughts.

  “No,” he said. Could it truly end like this? Gabriel had intended more for him. “We are not finished yet.” All evidence was that he would too soon be made a liar.

  “Messenger has spoken.”

  It was Arellya! She lived! In that moment, Hethor found hope, though he did not know how it might play out. “Arellya, open the navigator’s station,” he ordered. “I will take the helm and see what is possible. The rest of you, gather any cloth or padding from your sleeping places below and make the tightest nest you can. We will survive the breaking of the ship.”

  Given purpose, they ran, treading heedless on the faces of their own dead. It was too dark, too late, too hopeless for anything but whatever might grant them all a few more minutes of life.

  Hethor struggled to the helm. Once there he unfastened the catches that kept it in the hands of the magical, invisible pilot. Heart of God listed hard to the port now, so he steered into the list, trying to make a virtuous spiral of the airship’s vicious, dying necessity. There was no need to pull the levers that controlled altitude—the airship already had more descent in her than he would ever have cared for.

  Within moments only he and Arellya were on deck. Hethor fought the wheel as he tried to keep the ship heeled over to port. Arellya clung to the navigator’s station, but turned to face him. “We are still far from your goal, Messenger,” she shouted, “but it has been a good journey.”

  “We are not dead!”

  He could hear the smile, even in her answering yell. “Certainly we are. It is only that our bodies have not yet learned the truth.”

  The other engine began to strain. The gasbag shuddered in threatening sympathy. The deck had slanted over so far as to be useless for anything but a death trap, but the trim levers were worthless. Hethor reluctantly pulled the wheel back to center.

  Their only remaining advantage was that the hull still retained sufficient connection to the gasbag for the airship to fall slowly. Had the winged savages done much more of their work, even that solace would no longer matter.

  Hethor looked to his left, over the angled deck at the ice and snow below. It was much closer and moving too quickly for what an airship’s earthward progress should be.

  “Brace!” he shouted, just as the remaining stanchions ripped free in a series of popping noises. The seams on his life coming loose, Hethor realized.

  Then there was no deck, only falling. Then there was no falling, only deck. Ice and snow exploded around him, filled with splinters and planks and cold so sharp that its mere touch might snap bone.

  His last sight was the gasbag tumbling free, shapeless and eager for independent flight, a second, trackless moon rising in a sky dominated now by bright, uncaring stars.

  SOMEHOW, AGAINST all logic and memory, Hethor was warm. Not comfortable, but warm. He wasn’t ready to look. There was a carillon of pain in his joints and chest, and his head hurt as badly as he could ever remember. He smelled blood, sweat, and water, all overlain with a crackling smoke.

  Fire.

  Hethor opened his eyes with a sudden panic.

  The hull of Heart of God rose before him, broken-backed and partly shattered. The airship burned, sending gleaming smoke into a night sky that was still free of clouds. Stars surrounding the moon’s thread glittered like the points of blades as his eyes stung with smoke.

  A dozen correct people huddled with him or near him. Perhaps fifteen. Hethor was having trouble counting.

  “We are all that remain,” croaked one. Tiktiktee? Hethor could not recall the name. “Welcome to the end of worlds, Messenger.”

  “It’s not the end of the world,” Hethor said. “It’s the bottom.” Though what difference that made, he could not think. “We must make a trail south.”

  Tiktiktee sighed. “I would rather perish in the warmth here by the fire than march into the cold darkness to die. My soul would prefer it, too.”

  “Then I will go on alone.”

  “No.” It was Arellya, though he could not make her out through the blur of the smoke.

  Or was the blur in his eyes? “I ask no one, not even you, love,” Hethor said. “You have brought me farther than I ever thought to go. Stay here with the flames if that is your desire. But I have a mission to discharge.”

  He tried to stand. Amazingly, he succeeded. Hethor’s knees burned with cold and pain almost as badly as his lungs. He found he was already wrapped in blankets, so he turned slowly, his feet mashing deeper into the muddled snow until he found what he thought was south.

  “You will not last an hour,” Arellya said. She wriggled free from the huddle of her people and stepped across the snow to take his arm.

  Hethor realized that Arellya wore far fewer blankets than he did. “How can you stand the cold?”

  “It is just a different sort of jungle. Now stay here until the fire is almost gone. The heat will help, and you can sleep with less fear of being taken unawares by the chill.”

  So he sat again, surrounded by hairy bodies, watching this fire on the ice. It was so different from the fire in the jungle where he and Arellya had first met. No insects flew here; there was no food or water or dancing. But he was still with her and the correct people.

  “I have brought you too far,” he said. Tears stung his eyes, driving out for a moment even the smoke. “You came to help, and I have caused your people to be slaughtered. You will never see your jungle again. I apologize to all of you, to your dead, and to your tribe.”

  “You are the Messenger,” said Tiktiktee. “This is what had to be.”

  Hethor watched the ship burn for hours, until sleep took
him. He had a real rest this time.

  HE AWOKE again not knowing the hour, his muscles stiff nearly to the point of immobility. It was hard to know the time so far to the south. Heart of God still burned, though the airship was now little more than a line of coals and glowering ash. Their respite from the cold was at an end.

  Around him the correct people, led by Arellya, were organizing themselves for a trek southward. Even his own experiences with the New England winters told Hethor they would not last a day, not without food or decent coats and hats and boots. What else was to be done?

  He would die with his face pointed toward the pole.

  Noticing he was awake Arellya brought Hethor more blankets. “Wrap your arms and legs,” she said. She tossed some rope at his feet. “Here are vines, too.”

  “Thank you.” What else was there to do?

  Hethor armored himself against the cold as best he could, swathed in folds and layers. He tied off his sleeves and waist and neck. There was little he could do for his feet. The leather boots he’d worn since leaving William’s fortress were almost worn to shreds, but Hethor could not imagine walking any distance at all with his feet shrouded in cloth.

  All too soon they formed up into a marching line. The correct people looked so different from the happy band paddling the fleet of canoes that had set out so long ago, Hethor thought, but Arellya’s people still stirred him with pride. It was not that they were loyal to him. They were loyal to their own commitments. As he was to Gabriel.

  “You’ll just have to find another hero,” Hethor whispered.

  They began their straggling march, leaving the last of the fire for the deadly cold of the road south.

  HETHOR LED in order to break a trail in the snow for the rest of his party. None of the correct people were large enough to serve, but they were too heavy to scamper over the top. It was not a deep snow—just a layer upon tougher, slicker ice, and sometimes gravel at the ridgetops—but where there were ripples or dips, the snow could go from inches to feet deep in a step. The correct people would have been lost immediately.

  He set his pace with as much dedication as he could summon, though his feet were heavy as clock weights. “One.” Huff. “Two.” Puff. “Three.” Huff. “Four.”

  Pause.

  Rest.

  Do it again.

  There was nothing else, except perhaps to lie down and sleep.

  On he went, breaking the trail in a private universe of stinging pain and, strangely, hope. He was still alive, after all. That was a miracle, however temporary. He had fallen from the sky yet again and once more lived to tell of it.

  Behind him, Arellya also lived. Her whirring clockwork presence was audible to him. She had become a chain of love and desire wrapping his heart. He had been blessed by her before coming here to die.

  To hell with Pryce Bodean, Hethor thought. He can have his New Haven society girls and his future bishopric. I have lived.

  But the snow ate at his strength; the cold ate at his endurance; his feet had numbed to blocks. A glance back showed correct people straggling far behind, an irregular line of fur-bodied suffering. One dropped as he watched. There seemed to be others missing. He could not stop, though.

  “One.” Huff.

  “Two.” Puff.

  “Three.” Huff.

  “Four.”

  Could he do this, for days without food or water or rest? Would God lend him that much strength?

  His foot slipped, catching on a little ridge just beneath the surface. Hethor fell. He slid downhill into the snow ahead until he was engulfed in frozen darkness. He tried to scream, but his mouth was blocked. He tried to push it away, but it was like pushing the ocean. He closed his eyes, reaching for calm and the eerie false hope he’d felt moments before. All he could find was the rustling of the tiny ice crystals in the snow as they settled in to compact around his ears.

  This is where I die, Hethor thought.

  Little hands plucked at his blankets, reached under his hood to tug at his hair and shoulders. Hethor was hauled slowly out into the moonlight. There Arellya kissed him.

  “You will not die alone,” she said.

  “Hope,” croaked Hethor.

  “We sit now.”

  “Keep on. Huff and puff.”

  “We sit.”

  “No.”

  “Sit.”

  And so they sat, in a tight circle, leaning inward, nine hairy faces and Hethor arranged in a funereal tentwork of bodies. A gentle snow began to fall upon them. He wondered how they would look to some future natural scientist exploring the ice. That is, if the nations of man survived what was coming well enough for there to be future natural scientists.

  The Mainspring of the world ticked in his heart.

  “I shall pray,” Hethor whispered. He tried to recall the day when the correct people’s clicking, whistling language came to him. He fastened his attention onto the ticking of the Mainspring, imagined the massive escapements and gear trains necessary to turn the vast Earth. Counterpoint to that, he fixed on Arellya’s whirring, the sound of her nature that he almost always heard now.

  There was music beneath Creation. It was the clangor of brass and springs and pawls and stops and jacks—the greatest clock ever built. Every man and woman of any race was just a movement in the music, a tiny assembly within that vast train of clockwork.

  Hethor let the clicking build within his ears, drawing from both the great unwinding of the world and the feverish little rattle that was Arellya, filling in all the things in between.

  The stars had their own brittle, brilliant music. The moon hummed on her track, a silvery rattle much lighter than the roaring of the Earth’s passage. Night’s air was soft and vast. Snow scattered pin-bright upon the ground, a carpet of bright pain upon the slower-moving Earth. Each of the correct people surrounding him was their own song. All of them were in tune to one another, all their gear patterns closely allied.

  His ears lost the sound of breathing, lost the worrying whistle of the wind, heard only the gearing of the world.

  Everything was clockwork now, a vast sea of gears and springs and arbors and escapements and detents and shafts and wheels. Even his memories were of such things.

  Hethor had good memories.

  So he reached out to touch the world before him. The South Pole was a looming presence in the distance. Hethor faced that, made to part the way. A road was what he needed—a road of memory.

  He stopped some wheels spinning, reset some gears, bent some escapements back, changed the length and period of certain pendulums. He made a smooth, shining road of his memory that cut through the brass jungle of cold death.

  He closed his eyes, thanked God, and thought of Arellya.

  HETHOR STOOD in a field of brilliant flowers, poppies and marigolds and all the things that bloomed in a New England spring. Though there was no sun in the sky, the field was bright, and warm. Snow swirled in a deadly darkness a hundred yards to each side.

  Arellya limped from the still-huddled circle to hug him. “Messenger, you have done this thing.”

  “I …” Hethor didn’t know what he could or should say. “God did it.”

  “You did it.”

  Though he was in a field, the grassy marge stretched away south, topping the ridgelines and plowing through the snow in a bright band of warmth and color. A spring glistened nearby. Conies leapt and played.

  “We shall drink, and eat,” he said. Or was this his dying delirium?

  “To the hunt!” Arellya cried.

  Though they groaned out their pain, the eight surviving young males were happy for the warmth, and desperate for the food. They ran the rabbits down.

  “I WONDER how long it will last,” Hethor said, wiping blood from his lips. They had not been able to make a fire to cook the conies.

  “Do not think of that,” Arellya said. She glanced at the nearby wall of swirling snow. “Each breath here is a gift to our souls. A scrap which you were able to beg for us from God’
s campfire. I will live with it as long as I can.”

  “Am I a sorcerer, or is God?”

  “Are you concerned with the evil of other men? Do not be. Messenger, you are who you are.”

  She took him by the hand, and the two of them found a gentle slope a small distance from the young males. There they lay among the poppies and had the joy of each other’s bodies one last, unexpected time.

  HETHOR AND the correct people walked for days, eating flowers, hunting small animals, and drinking from springs. Where the meadow-road met an escarpment, it snaked around, up hidden ravines and sly valleys, but otherwise their progress was steadily to the south. The polar winter was always just a few hundred yards behind them, the road vanishing as they progressed along it.

  Each step was a cheat of death. Each breath was borrowed life. The smell of the flowers crushed beneath Hethor’s feet was like stars burning in his head, each tingle a bright light. The gears were never far away either, echoing in the buzzing wings of the bees that tended the flowers, gleaming in the strange light that lit their path though all around them was howling polar darkness.

  Two weeks after they had set out walking, Hethor began to hear a deep rumble underneath the whisper of the storms and the endless chatter of gears that had captured his hearing. This new noise was more measured, slower, and somehow bigger than any sound he’d heard since the great gear atop the Equatorial Wall had stolen his hearing. And perhaps his mind, Hethor had to admit.

  “Do you hear it?” he asked Tiktiktee.

  The correct person shook his head, a gesture copied from Hethor. “No. You have the hearing of the world, Messenger.”

  “I think it is the South Pole. We approach the axle of the world.”

  “Your journey is almost over.”

  “Or just begun.”

  THREE DAYS later, cresting a rise, Hethor and the correct people saw the South Pole.

  Perhaps two more miles of the flowered highway stretched ahead. It was lit as always by some milky version of Heaven’s light though the storms and darkness swirled around them. The highway ended in a great circular meadow. In the center of the meadow a brass shaft erupted like a javelin stuck into the unyielding earth. It was about a quarter mile in diameter, and rose to vanish frost-rimed into the dark sky above.