Bitter Cold: A Steampunk Snow Queen (The Clockwork Republic Series Book 4) (11 page)

Silence filled the parlor for a long moment, before it was broken by a laugh like the sound of shattering crystal.

"Of course I'm joking, Mrs. Halfacre. Although to read what some of those awful newspaper reporters write about me, I'm sure it sounds almost plausible. You did seem quite distressed for a moment there." A hard, glittering-white smile spread across Evelyn's face.

Halfacre sucked in an enormous breath of relief. "You are quite a good actress, ma'am. If your business interests ever falter, you could consider a career on the stage. But in all earnestness, what is it you need me to do?"

"Nothing terribly demanding. I simply need you to delay a young girl."

A puzzled expression passed the widow's face. "Who do you need me to delay, and how?"

"The new tinker I've found has left behind his paramour in order to come work for me. She's a bit flighty and I'm afraid she'll prove to be a distraction. We're leaving for Pineville tomorrow, and I'm afraid she might come here and make a scene. I need you to intercept her. Bring her around to the Summer Garden. I'll have tea waiting with a harmless formulae to make her sleep. When she's unconscious, ring for my butler and leave. He'll take care of her."

"Your automaton will take care of her?"

"He'll watch over her until she wakes, which should be well after the tinker and I have left. I'm leaving an airship ticket for her to return home. Just make sure the girl takes the tea, ring for Gaskon, and leave. That's all."

"Well, that seems simple enough."

"Oh, and one last thing." Evelyn walked to a writing desk, and opened the wooden case which lay atop it. "I have been working on these." She pulled out one of the clockwork ravens. "They're quite ingenious little messengers. You simply squeeze the wings against the body, speak a short message and it flies to deliver it. I think they may be useful for those who can't read or write. Once you've taken care of the girl, if you would be so kind as to ease my mind?"

"Of course," said Halfacre, placing the black bird gingerly into her satchel. But her guarded expression betrayed that her own mind was not at ease. Not at all.

~*~

Kit shivered and looked around. He was surrounded by sparkling ice and snow. Gleaming blue-white scrollwork ornamented every surface in sight. The floor was chiseled into a parquet pattern of ice, rubbed rough enough to walk upon without slipping. A glittering frosty chandelier hung high overhead, shooting out prismatic beams of light in all directions.

How had he come to be here? This place was a palace, an enormous cavernous space. An urgent, anxious feeling anchored deep in his gut. There was something he needed to do, but he couldn't remember what it was. Something about "eternity."

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of blonde hair. He spun towards the image, just as the figure turned a corner. Had it been a pale platinum color, or a warm honey-gold? It had been too brief a glimpse to tell. He ran towards the retreating figure. He could hear the swish of skirts across the floor. A sense of panic gripped him.

You're going to lose her.

He picked up speed, desperate to catch up, his feet skittering on the slippery floor. He could hear the rhythmic clacking of boots ahead, but with every turn deeper into the labyrinth of the ice palace, the sound seemed further away.

Always tantalizingly out of reach.

Every so often, he could catch sight of a woman's skirt slipping around a corner. The weird, prismatic light bouncing off the layers upon layers of ice made the fabric appear blue to green to red and back again.

"Come back!" he shouted. "Please, don't go!"

His eyes, nose and throat burned from the cold.

A feminine voice called back. "Who are you looking for, Kit?"

He stopped in his tracks. He didn't know who he was chasing, or why.

~*~

A deep quiet settled over the town house. Halfacre had been dismissed and the mechanic lay asleep in the servants' quarters. Evelyn had no use for the rooms now. Gaskon and the other 'gens simply stopped moving, frozen into brass and steel statuary when they weren't needed.

The thought of Gaskon pinched her face with a frown. She was certain the 'gen had paused at the mention of Isadora Halfacre.

Evelyn chided herself. It couldn't possibly hurt just to slip down to the laboratory and ensure all was as it should be. There was also the matter Valentine's pet project. He was as unpredictable as the weather, but his telegram meant he was anxious to hear if there had been any progress. She might as well reassure herself his grand idea was nothing but a fairy tale, concocted by an English madwoman.

She slipped through the twisting hallways of the enormous house, till she reached a door at the far western end. Gaskon had followed her, his usual silent movement rendered sinister by her own imagination.

"I don't require anything further tonight. Please return to the parlor." The automaton nodded, and retreated down the hallway. She opened the door, turned a dial to raise the flame on the gaslights, and headed down the twisting spiral staircase. Her laboratory looked just as she'd expected; still, cold and silent.

It was a very large room, much bigger than the original cellar had been. It had taken weeks of excavation, shoring up, and construction to expand it. But the effort and expense had been entirely worth it. Along one long wall lay rows of polished wooden cabinets, rather like caskets, although each had a round porthole of glass in the door. Copper pipes and black rubber hoses snaked around and through them, each covered with a thin layer of frost.

She approached the first cabinet, brushing the light glaze of ice from the porthole. Within the cabinet, she could see a large gray wolf. Every few moments, the beast's chest rose and fell. The breathing was much slower than normal, of course, but that was a result of the animus transferral process.

Just as Valentine's notes indicated, she'd been able to extract the animus from the wolf and bind it to her metal construct without killing it. The key was applying an alchemical formulae to induce a death-like sleep. Bringing the creature to the brink of death loosened the bonds between the body and animus.

She called her new creations animatons. The fashion of keeping clockwork pets was in vogue right now. People would pay large sums for realistic, lifelike creatures. As long as the Guild couldn't trace them back to her, it could be a lucrative new product.

Her heels clipped across the stone floor as she strode to the last of the cabinets. Beneath the glass lay the sleeping face of Hiram Halfacre, her erstwhile factory foreman.

This had been the next logical step in the process. Gresham had brought the man in, after rigging the pipe explosion so no one would be looking for him.

If he'd died in the process of creating the animaton, it would have been simple to slip his body back into the debris. But it hadn't killed him, no agents from the Guild had turned up, and now she had a perfect mechanical servant.

Valentine's interest in the experiment was more martial than commercial. The mad genius was convinced he could create an army of mechanicals. Evelyn's response had been conventional wisdom. It would take an army to capture and subdue enough men to animate an army. His reply had startled her.

He'd claimed he knew the secret to creating true artificial life: homunculi.

The artificial creatures had been mentioned in the legends of alchemy for centuries, but they were just that. A legend. No one could create life from nothing.

Valentine had produced a manuscript from an Englishwoman named Mary Shelley, the wife of the famous poet. It consisted of a collection of letters and correspondence which detailed a German scientist's attempt to reanimate a creature cobbled together from bits of corpses. Supposedly, he'd succeeded, although not without consequence.

"Electricity, my dear!" Valentine had exclaimed. "That is the source of the spark of life. That is what the traditional instructions for creating homunculi missed. Homunculi have small, fragile bodies. But imagine if we use the process you've perfected to capture the animus from hundreds of them. We could create a mechanical army, clever and agile as living men, who feel no pain, and cannot be stopped."

She had nodded along, but it was clear the idea was sheer folly. She'd agreed to perform some tests for him. He claimed to be a theoretical alchemist only, without a laboratory of his own. More likely, he preferred to let others take the risk of getting caught enacting his experiments. The tanks along the other wall of her laboratory were the result. Floating in the
aqua vitae
were a dozen tiny bodies, their features indefinite at this stage in the process and obscured by murky fluid.

Creating the mannikins, and getting them to a stage of development where they had recognizable features was simple. Now they remained in a vegetative state, floating in their tanks, unreactive to all but the most violent electrical stimuli.

She had tried to enervate the little beasties by electrifying the tanks with a steam-driven generator. Aside from some thrashing, nothing had come of it. In her opinion, if it were to work at all, it would require electricity of a wattage which could not be produced by anything less than a bolt of lightning. Unfortunately, one never knew when or where lightning would strike.

The homunculi had grown a bit in the week she had been away. Their features seemed infinitesimally sharper. Evelyn decided to give the generator another go. She put on her safety goggles, donned rubber gloves and threw the switch which would send an electrical current jolting through the copper pipes wound through the tanks.

Just as before, the little creatures twitched and thrashed, splashing fluid over the edges of the tanks. When she threw the switch back again, their movement stopped.

"Fool! These creatures are a waste of my time."

She pulled the gloves and goggles off, and headed for the stairwell. Gaskon's power source was still safely ensconced in the cabinet. The alchemical seals appeared intact, and nothing could rouse their inhabitants while that remained the case.

While she was reassured nothing was amiss with Gaskon or the wolves, she worried about the lack of progress on the homunculi. She doubted Valentine would take failure gracefully, and this particular experiment could lead nowhere else.

It was essential Kit complete the Eternity Engine, and quickly. Once she had a weapon capable of eliminating huge swaths of people, Valentine's concerns would no longer be any of hers.

Chapter 11

Digging Up the Past

It didn't take long for Greta to find the home of Evelyn DeWinter, the infamous Snow Queen. As she asked passing strangers for directions, it seemed everyone in Little Rock knew about the woman, although nearly everyone told a different tale.

"Rumor has it, she murdered her father to take over his company. Then she seduced a half dozen honest businessmen to steal theirs!"

"She's a monster! I've heard wolves howling around that mansion of hers -- seen strange things through the windows. Mark my words, she's not human!"

"All those stories are mere nonsense. She's just a powerful woman who knows her own mind. Some folk don't like that, is all."

The more Greta heard about the Snow Queen, the more uncertain she was about what the woman might want with Kit. It all seemed so fantastic, so unlikely. Then she considered the sleigh sitting covered by brush and branches on the outskirts of town. Unlikely and fantastic seemed to be her stock in trade this week.

By late morning, she'd made her way to the elegant town house located in a fashionable part of town.

Was Kit inside? Did she dare to just walk up to the front door and pull the bell?

As much as she longed to see his face again, to know he was alive and well, a part of her was also terrified. It could very well have been exactly as Captain Hamm suggested. Kit may have simply seized an opportunity. For all she knew, there was a telegram waiting back in St. Louis, explaining everything.

Or the Snow Queen could be a madwoman who was torturing him with alchemical poison while Greta fretted on the street corner.

"They've already left." A thin, reedy woman's voice reached her from a narrow alley running alongside the limestone mansion.

Greta looked into the windswept alley. She saw a plump old grey-haired woman in a black taffeta dress. A dark veil adorned her shabby black hat, which had once been fine.

"Who's already left?" said Greta warily.

"The young man and the Snow Queen."

"Who's to say I'm watching for anyone?"

"Your manner, girl. If you're not careful, you'll be run over by one of these infernal smoke-belching contraptions. You're not watching where you go, but you are watching for someone to come out of that house." She lowered her voice conspiratorially. "I know where you can find him. You follow a boy of about your age, of sturdy build, with dark hair and eyes? Have you come from Missouri?"

Greta's eyes narrowed. "How could you know that?"

The woman looked around as if concerned she was being watched. "Not here, my girl. Not in the open. If you care about the tinker, you must come with me this instant!"

~*~

Greta hesitated. The woman looked harmless and genuinely afraid, clutching an enormous black leather satchel tightly to her chest, yet something seemed suspicious about her manner. Still, she clearly knew something about Kit. Regardless of whether Kit had come here willingly, simply marching up to the front door of the mansion and knocking didn't seem like the cleverest plan. An old woman's account had gotten her this far. How dangerous could it be to listen to this one?