Clockwork Angels: The Novel (28 page)

Owen had lived with Pangloss for months, and he felt
he
owed the Commodore for all the man had done. “You can keep the wages, sir. You’ve done so much for me.”

“And you’ve done plenty for me, too, young man. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had a friend who was so optimistic? Someone who can see the colors of dreams?”

Owen flushed, and he felt a lump in his throat. “I always thought that was a disadvantage.”

“Not for everyone. I will keep your wages for you, in trust— because I expect you to come back.”

“Yes, sir.” Owen considered the long journey he was about to undertake, the many nights he would spend alone out in the desert. “I have a favor to ask. . . . Do you think I might borrow the book—the one my mother wrote?”

“She wasn’t your real mother, Mr. Hardy.”

“But she might have been.”

He smiled. “Then the book is yours.”

When they had made all the necessary preparations and were just finding excuses not to part ways, they stood by the steamliner in awkward conversation. Owen tucked the travelogue by Hanneke Lakota in his pack, shuffled his feet, and made ready to go.

Holding up a finger, the Commodore climbed into the locomotive cabin and came back out with a small device similar to the one on the piloting deck. “I have a spare,” he said. “Carry this dreamline compass. It will tell you where you are, help you follow the world’s field lines.” He pointed to a satellite watchface connected to the gears and the drifting magnetic needle of the main compass. “And this second dial shows you where you
should
be. Only you can set that.”

Tears sprang to Owen’s eyes as he accepted the dreamline compass. He embraced Pangloss, thanking him for everything and promising to return safely. Someday. Even the Commodore’s brown eyes were wet. “I thought you were too much of a dreamer at first, Mr. Hardy, but I’ve gotten to enjoy the way you think big.”

After all he had been through, Owen was amazed he still had some of the dreamer about him. Pangloss had given him a job, friendship, a library of knowledge, and a place to heal. And now, finding the Seven Cities would restore Owen’s heart.

He thanked Pangloss again, and as the Commodore climbed aboard to feed red coal into the great hungry engine, Owen headed in the other direction, leaving Endoline behind.

On my way at last
. He entered the wilderness of mountains.

A man could lose his past in a country like this—and that was exactly what Owen wanted. Parts of his past, anyway. Heading toward the west and out of the mountains, he followed his dreams and ran from his nightmares. He chose his own path and consulted the dreamline compass sparingly.

During his quiet life in Albion, he had never considered that there might be places without roads or steamliner rails, or that anyone would want to go there. The Watchmaker imposed a safety net—or maybe it was just a
net
—of civilization upon the landscape.

Now Owen walked over wooded hills, fighting his way through underbrush to reach the top of a ridge for no particular reason other than because he wanted to, and the view was worth all the effort. From the fringes of the mountain range, he looked down toward the drier western slope and the diminishing foothills that petered out into an expansive desert beyond.

The hunter in the tavern had given him guidance on which berries, mushrooms, leaves, and roots he could eat. And he warned Owen—very wisely, now that he thought about it—to live off the land while in the forested hills so that he could save his packed food supplies for the austere desert.

Even though he was alone and in uncharted places—dependent on himself without any Watchmaker, carnies, or airship pilot to help—Owen felt refreshed. He slept well enough on the soft underbrush beneath the comforting embrace of branches. It was better than a cold, dank alley in Poseidon.

The vegetation became sparser, more scrub brush and mesquite, the trees stunted, the rocks prominent; the wide open sky seemed a more infinite blue. As he walked into the Redrock Desert, he discovered something cleansing about the landscape. He had more time to think than ever before in his life, but most of the

time—as if he still followed Francesca’s advice—he thought of nothing at all. The utter silence made him wonder if he’d gone deaf, until it was broken by the occasional caw of a crow.

He had no ticking clocks, no schedule, and no plan. The time he experienced was marked only by the rise and set of the sun, not by an hour hand that pointed to an arbitrary number on a clockface. He set his dreamline compass, marking a route back to Endoline, should he ever want to return there; the second needle on the compass, the one that indicated where he
should
be, wavered in random directions.

Owen chose a path that led him to interesting rock formations and followed the golden glow that he saw each afternoon at sunset. Cíbola was out there. Somewhere. He left footprints where there had never been footprints before.

High up on sheer, inaccessible canyon walls, exotic figures and towering pictographs had been scribed by members of some long lost civilization. He craned his neck, staring at the messages and wondering if they had been meant for him. The language was as incomprehensible as the alchemical symbols he had seen in Tomio’s reference books.

Owen wondered if the inhabitants of the Seven Cities were truly lost, if they had skipped over to some adjacent world, as the bookshop owner had suggested . . . or if they had just decided to hide.

But he had read his other-mother’s stories, and he knew what lay out there. He imagined that the people of Cíbola had formed their own paradise far from the mines and the mountains, far from Poseidon City, from Albion and the Watchmaker. A perfect society where happy people did what they wanted, fulfilled themselves— not caring that the rest of the world had forgotten them. If he ever found the tall mesa and the Seven Cities, he would have to convince the people he was a worthy addition to their utopia. He could entertain them by juggling; he could even tend their apple orchards, should they have any.

He came upon majestic arches like windows to a new world. Lumpy obelisks and hoodoos reminded him of distorted mushrooms or playful shapes like hunched trolls. He remembered when he would look up at the clouds and point out shapes to Lavinia. With no one beside him now, all the imaginary shapes were his own.

He continued across the uneven wasteland, and his feet grew sore from walking. Roads and well-traveled paths had their advantages! He had to pick his way across stones washed down from the mountainsides in flash floods. He slogged through uneven sand, climbed rilles of sharp black rock, and followed runoff washes.

The Redrock Desert became a grim eternity of spiny cacti and Joshua trees. The only creatures he saw were lizards, scorpions, a rattlesnake. But he continued to walk, sure he would stumble upon the Seven Cities.

The nights grew cold and lasted longer than he remembered. After sunset, all the warmth drained out of the air, leaving the ground brittle and cold. He had always thought deserts were hot dry places, but Pangloss had insisted he carry a blanket in his pack. Owen shivered and wrapped it around himself.

He scrounged scraps of mesquite wood, used a pinch of exothermic powder from his pack, and the alchemical reaction burst into a hot flame that ignited the wood. He huddled, trying to read by firelight, paging through the chronicle of his other-mother’s life. She had had such wonderful adventures, but he wondered if they had always felt that way to her. The campfire warmed him for a while, but the dry and airy wood burned so quickly that his fire collapsed into embers before he could gather more branches.

Each morning, he woke to aching cold. He drank most of his water before he realized he had seen no fresh pools in some time. Somewhere out there, if he came upon the sparkling white lake between the sun and the moon and the great mesa that held the Seven Cities, he would have all he could wish for. For now, though,

as he wandered down the canyon washes each morning, he found seeps of water covered with a diamond skin of ice, with which he tried to fill his water sack; more often his attempts resulted in sandy mud instead of fresh water.

Off in the distance, through wavering air that rippled up from the flat ground, he saw golden structures like sparkling clocktowers that dwarfed any architecture he had seen in Crown City. The mirage glittered in the sun, like a revelation, but as he kept walking it seemed as far away as the constellations he studied every night. When he finally arrived, the golden clocktowers were merely rock formations, weathered and uninhabited.

His water was gone, and his food disappeared the day after. When he fell to his knees, rocks bit into his skin. He dug into the pebbly dirt, hoping to uncover moisture, but he found only sand and rocks, no matter how deep he dug.

He kept plodding, but saw little now. He faced the very real possibility that he could lose his life in a country like this. Thinking of the books in the Commodore’s library, he relived his adventures and wrote his story in his mind. But he had no friends, no audience, and no one would ever read the tale of his life. . . .

Imagining that his carnival friends were there, even Francesca, he picked up rocks from the ground and juggled them, but he fumbled the rocks and dropped them. When he turned to see if Francesca was cheering or jeering, her image had vanished.

Finally, he saw an imposing mesa ahead that seemed to rise out of an expansive white lake, like a plain of glittering diamonds. By the way it sparkled and glowed in the pounding daylight, Owen knew that this must be the lake between the sun and the moon. Refusing to believe it was a mirage, he ran to it, though his feet were bleeding, his throat was parched. At last, when he came to the crumbling shore of the blessed spring, he dropped to his knees, and plunged his hands into . . . nothing more than powder, bitter salt left by a prehistoric sea. He wept then, and his salt tears were just as bitter.

Across the lake, though, the sheer cliffs of the isolated mesa rose up like an island in the sky. As the sunlight slanted down, he glimpsed golden reflections on top, rectangular shapes, unnatural sculptures. Cíbola had to be up there . . . if only he could climb that high. With bleeding fingers, he managed to set the second dial on his dreamline compass, since he now had an anchor point.

He trudged across the dry saltpan. Occasional pools seeped through the crystalline powder, and in desperation he scooped the water into his mouth, but it tasted foul and slippery, saturated with chemicals that made him retch. His lips burned, his skin was raw, his eyes so dry and gritty that he was sunblind.

He reached the base of the mesa and picked his way through the fallen rocks until he discovered an actual path, a steep way that relied on a crack in the cliff and narrow connecting ledges. He worked his way up. When he found hand- and footholds chiseled into the slickrock, he knew that this was where he was supposed to be. He could juggle, and he had walked a tightrope; even without Francesca’s encouragement, he could climb a rock wall.

The Seven Cities of Gold were up there. This must be some sort of test, to prove to the people there that he deserved to be among them. His other-mother had done this herself. . . .

He pulled himself higher, using hands, feet, elbows, knees. He reached a dead end, then found a tiny ledge no wider than his hand. He grasped it, thinking of the windowsills and the façade of the ministry building by which he had escaped the mob in Chronos Square. He could do this. He pressed his weary body flat against the cliff and worked his way over to the next ledge.

He zigzagged from one crack to another, always climbing, giving no thought to how he would ever get back down. Once he reached Cíbola on top of the mesa, the people would welcome him. After the tribulations he had undergone to get here, he belonged with them.

When he finally hauled himself over the lip of the mesa to a wide expanse of brittle brown grass that was open to the sky, he did see a city: clusters of tan adobe buildings, some of them two stories tall with open windows like the empty eye sockets of a skull. The legendary city was not much larger than Barrel Arbor— silent, abandoned. He saw no people at all.

He staggered toward his long-awaited treasure, disbelieving, even delirious. Cíbola was already extinct. The truth had been forgotten, leaving only a few wisps of memory and exaggerated stories. Whatever the reasons, the people here had died out, or departed . . . maybe because of chaos and anarchy, maybe because of too many rigid rules.

This was a city for ghosts; the buildings were now no more than palaces for rodents. Not gold, but fool’s gold.
Time to put all this foolishness behind you.
He heard no conversation or laughter, only the wind whistling through open doors. There was nothing else.

A
s Owen sat alone in the abandoned city, he could not measure the vast difference between his imagination and reality—couldn’t even bear to try. Hungry, parched, and lost, he crawled into the nearest building, leaned against a wall, and wept until he fell asleep. All his journeys, all his adventures, all his dreams had led him from one place to another, but the stories had betrayed him, and people had deceived him. Maybe the Watchmaker was trying to teach him a lesson, to demonstrate that he should have stayed exactly where he was, played his part like a tiny cog in the great machine. Everything had its place, and every place had its thing.

And now here he was in the middle of the vast redrock wasteland in a haunted city inhabited by unrealistic dreams. . . .

When he awoke, cool and unexpectedly refreshed, he found that a glimmer of optimism had survived even this disappointment. He drew a deep breath, felt the reassuring weight of the walls around him, and reminded himself that he was
here
, regardless. He decided to explore.