Clockwork Angels: The Novel (26 page)

“I prayed just to get away from Crown City,” Owen said. “With the Regulators chasing me and alarms all across the city, I looked at the cargo steamer ready to depart and thought of everything I had heard of Poseidon, the Seven Cities of Gold, the wonders of Atlantis. I knew everything would be better there. . . . I didn’t know it was all a lie.”

“Aye,” said Pangloss. “And everyone here has heard about the perfection of the Watchmaker’s Stability and the Clockwork Angels, that nothing ever goes wrong—everything has its place, and every place has its thing. It’s nice to have colorful stories that you can cling to like a blanket on a chilly evening.” His lips curved upward, though they remained overshadowed by his beard. “I can tell you that few people in Atlantis would want to be locked into the rigid schedules imposed by the Watchmaker, nor would we want uniformed Regulators inspecting every frivolous thing we might do. Even if we make unwise decisions, they’re ours to make, not someone else’s.”

Owen hunched over, pulled his blanket close, and groaned. Pangloss took pity on him. “You grew up in the Stability—I suppose you can’t be blamed for who you are. I didn’t originally come from here, but got . . . derailed from my own world. Nevertheless, I’ve made a good enough life for myself—mainly, I stay away from Poseidon as much as possible. A place like this will eat away at you soon enough.”

“Where else do you go?” Owen imagined that any place had to be better than the dark and dirty streets of the city.

“Aboard my steamliner, of course.” The Commodore smiled. “She’s a magnificent airship—flies free through the night and then alights on the rails and take us into each station along the mining route.” He heaved a sigh and spoke as if he were talking about a lover. “Not one of those lovely, bloated caravans that travels across Albion. She’s just a cargo liner—but she’s my ship regardless.”

Pangloss scratched his voluminous beard as if searching for a lost keepsake hidden among the strands, and he fell silent, pondering. Owen could see that the Commodore was a man who liked to consider his words before saying something he could not retract. “Rest up, eat up, and get yourself well, Owen Hardy from Barrel Arbor. I could use an assistant to help me stoke the fires and guide my steamliner. Ride with me for a while.”

The Commodore’s airship consisted of the locomotive dirigible and seven bulky cargo cars, each kept buoyant by tightly sewn canvas bags that swelled with hot steam piped in from the main boiler.

The cargo cars were scuffed and dented, but clean. On his regular run, Pangloss hauled shipments of redfire opals, chalcedony, red coal, reactive ferrocerium, and kegs of rare alchemical powders excavated from the mountains. After delivering his cargo to Poseidon, he returned to the mountains with foodstuffs, clothing, tools, and equipment.

The main engine car also served as the Commodore’s traveling home. The pilot’s cabin smelled of oranges from the oil with which he polished the wooden furnishings. Owen stood before the controls that guided the airship when it was aloft and looked at the magnetic alignment compass that guided the steamliner back down to the rails for a landing.

The locomotive’s alchemical engine reminded him of a giant pet mastiff, powerful and growling but loyal to its owner. Also like a large mastiff, it needed to be fed regularly. Pangloss and Owen worked together, shoveling red coal and dumping barrels of sweet-smelling distillate of naphtha. The reaction was triggered by a catalyst of coldfire—premixed, packaged, and sold to Poseidon by the alchemist-priests of Crown City.

With Owen at his side learning the tasks, Commodore Pangloss spent two days loading his cargo cars with necessities for the mining villages on the steamliner route. Owen did additional chores like sweeping, scrubbing, and painting the cargo cars; he followed the Commodore around the warehouses and supply shops. He never caught a glimpse of Guerrero.

His muscles still ached from the beating. The bruises on his body—now plainly visible because he kept his skin clean—had turned alarming shades of purple and yellow, like something the carny clowns might have painted on themselves. Seeing Owen’s battered condition, some of the rough station yardworkers let out guttural chuckles, assuming Commodore Pangloss beat his apprentice. Offended by their attitude, Pangloss shook his nightstick at them, which only reinforced their assumptions.

Late one afternoon, when they were finally ready to set off, Owen’s excitement built like the pressure inside the steam boiler. He looked away from the cluttered city and thought about the mysterious continent, all the unexplored places inland. Somewhere in those mountains and deserts lay the legendary Seven Cities of Gold. Though gold itself had been devalued in Crown City, thanks to the Watchmaker’s alchemy, it could still purchase goods in Atlantis. Yet the wonder and mystery were the real treasure. . . . They stoked the engines and sealed the boiler, turned the valves so that the pressure built up, filled the conduits, and inflated the zeppelin bags of the cars. The coldfire sparkled brighter in the containment chamber. The locomotive shuddered; the big steel wheels began to turn and spark, reminding Owen of the tiny flame sprites that Tomio had created as an alchemical trick for his birthday. So long ago . . .

The steamliner awakened and began to move forward. The parallel tracks that extended into the hills glowed a phosphorescent blue as the levitating train accelerated.

The Commodore stood on the pilot deck gazing through the front windows, intent on the rails ahead. Mountain silhouettes bit off the horizon, which was bathed in deepening colors of sunset. “Go stoke the engines some more, Mr. Hardy,” the Commodore said. “We need to get up our steam, inflate all the sacks. We’re about to fly!”

Owen ran to add more red coal and reactive powders to the exothermic chamber. The locomotive engine puffed, growled, and bellowed like an animal declaring its territory. He ran back up to the piloting window and stood beside Pangloss as they hurtled along the rails.

The silver lines in front of them abruptly disappeared as the tracks ended.

When the accelerating steamliner reached the end of the line, it leaped into the air as gracefully as Francesca. Instead of sprouting spring-loaded angel wings, though, the steamliner lifted off the ground and soared into the sky.

Commodore Pangloss stroked his beard as he stared ahead with a proud paternal smile. “Have you ever been on a steamliner before, Mr. Hardy?”

Owen took a moment to find his voice. “Yes, and no. Never like this.” He caught his breath. “Never anything like this.”

They continued ahead as night wrapped around them, smooth and quiet. The Commodore showed him how to find their course with the liquid-crystal compass, how to check the way the wind blew, how to keep them aligned on the proper vector so they could find the destination rails again when it came time to land. Owen steered the airship right across the stars, and they flew by night into the mountains.

Stories that fired my imagination

T
raveling aboard the steamliner with Commodore Pangloss, Owen rested, recovered, and remembered who he was. His bruises and his aching bones healed. His spirit awakened from its slumber.

Although his broken heart still felt heavy in his chest, he was able to wrap up his thoughts of Francesca and lock them away. The memories were there, like cargo weighing down a boat, but at least they were out of sight. On rare nights, he woke up thinking he had heard her laughter, but it was just the noise of the steamliner traveling along.

Eventually, he would be able to view his memories of her from a new perspective, as if they were pristine chronotypes, and he would remember the fond parts more easily than his disappointment. He imagined what he might have said differently, alternative choices he could have made, and how Francesca might have responded. If there were many other possible worlds, much like this one but different, perhaps in one of them he had done everything right. . . .

The Commodore’s route took them from one mining town to another, servicing populations increasingly distant from Poseidon. The steamliner stopped at industrial stations, smelters, openpit mines, salt caverns, and dry lakebeds scabbed with valuable chemicals; they exchanged their supplies, filled the cargo cars, and returned to Poseidon City to unload, whereupon they set off again as soon as possible. Pangloss smiled to see how hard Owen worked. “With your assistance, Mr. Hardy, I can spend even less time in the city.”

On other runs, they traveled deep into the mountains to redcoal excavation mines in isolated canyons, where expansive grottos had been hollowed out as workers chipped away to recover sardelian, cinnabar, and aventurine, and even rarer inclusions of diamonds.

Seeing the wealth of strange substances loaded aboard at each stop, Owen could not help but think of Tomio and his alchemical library of powders, liquids, and metals that combined in unusual and miraculous ways. While they worked together, Commodore Pangloss explained about the materials, which were so precious to the Watchmaker back in Albion, schooling Owen in geology, chemistry, alchemy, and even economics, for every resource was an engine that drove part of society’s machinery.

The airship flew over the rugged, primitive terrain and followed the course indicated by their main dreamline compass, which guided them to the next set of destination rails. By now Owen knew that each mining town had its own character: some were dirty and smoky, others rowdy and boisterous. After his experiences in Poseidon, he had no great desire to explore taverns or rough streets, and whenever they stayed over in frontier inns, he remained near to the Commodore.

During their weeks and months together, Owen became very close to Pangloss. Like Guerrero, the airship pilot seemed especially reluctant to tell his personal story, and the few tidbits he did reveal were cast in such a way as to be intentionally uninteresting. He mentioned only that he came from another place, a world that was the same but different, known to only a few and inaccessible to most. Owen didn’t know what he meant, which was exactly as the Commodore intended.

“Why do you grow your beard so big and unruly?” he asked one morning as they flew across an open blue sky with a mountain range in the distance.

The Commodore narrowed his dark brown eyes. “You may as well ask why I shave my head so smooth.” He ran his fingers over his dark scalp.

“Why do you shave your head so smooth?”

“Some things should not be asked.”

For Owen, the best times were those quiet hours with the Commodore aboard the steamliner, alone in the sky. In an expansive cabinet that covered an entire wall of the living chamber, Pangloss kept a personal library of books. It included an impressive collection he had purchased from the Underworld Bookshop, and Courier was pleased to find special “imported” items for him. To Owen, it seemed enough words to last a lifetime, and the Commodore looked forward to acquiring more.

When Owen first poked through the library, he was disappointed to find that it lacked large volumes with lavish illustrations, such as the ones his mother had kept. He hoped for another edition of the Crown City retrospective, such as he had seen in the bookshop display window, but he found no picture books at all. Due to space constraints aboard the steamliner, Pangloss preferred compact editions, portable volumes with extremely tiny print (he sometimes needed a large magnifier to decipher the sentences).

Even without lavish chronotype plates, the books contained much of value, and Pangloss convinced him to read the words, to think about the philosophy, the history of the world(s), the underpinnings of natural science, the basic principles of hydraulics, the speculations of alchemy. As he pondered the texts, Owen created his own pictures in his mind, and they were better, sharper, and brighter pictures than the chronotypes he remembered.

After reading essays, Owen would discuss the ideas with Pangloss, who was glad to listen to alternative opinions. No one had ever asked Owen what he thought before; no one had ever encouraged him to think. Everything has its place, and every place has its thing. He remembered the hypnotic pronouncements of the Clockwork Angels—
Ignorance is well and truly blessed
—but he didn’t believe that anymore. Ignorance had caused him a great deal of trouble. If he had been given the correct information, he would not have made so many mistakes; he would not have undertaken this arduous journey in the first place.