Clockwork Angels: The Novel (6 page)

The steel wheels scraped on tracks that glowed faintly with alchemical residue. When the steamliner began to slow on its approach to the city, the nameless stranger stood and brushed himself off. “Are you prepared for what awaits you, young Owen Hardy? I see you didn’t bring much.”

“I have an apple . . .” he said, but realized that wouldn’t be enough.

The stranger wasn’t impressed. “Do you have money? Crown City operates on money.”

Owen was flustered. “I’m sorry, sir. I’m poorly prepared.”

“Sometimes it’s best not to plan.”The man reached for a leather pouch at his side and upended it into Owen’s hands, giving him all the money he had—nine coins of various denominations, each embossed with the Watchmaker’s honeybee. “Take this, my good friend. It gives you more freedom to do whatever you like.”

Owen gratefully accepted the gift. “Thank you, sir. You’re very generous.”

The man gave him a smile that was not a smile and held on to the edge of the cargo car with his burn-scarred hand. “Generous, am I? Maybe I just like the idea that you’ll owe me.”

“Then I’ll do my best to repay your kindness someday,” Owen said.

The steamliner slowed toward its destination, and the first buildings flashed by, warehouses and factories sprawling on the fringes of the city. They rolled past streets crowded with row houses; some of the windows were brightly lit, while others remained dark as sleepers clung to their last few moments in bed.

“You’ll want to get off the steamliner before it reaches the heart of the city.” The man raised his significant eyebrows. “The Regulators don’t like stowaways.”

The cargo car rolled past a thick, bushy hedge. Without a glance at Owen, the stranger hopped off the steamliner as if levitating and vanished out the cargo door. With a yelp, Owen leaped to his feet, sure the man must be dead. But when he leaned out the cargo door and looked back down the line, he saw the man pick himself up from a thick hedge, brush himself off, and dart away.

Owen pocketed the coins the stranger had given him along with his remaining apple, and looked ahead at the buildings of Crown City. Above them rose the glorious, monolithic clocktower, the tallest in the land—no doubt in all the whole world. He already knew many of the wonders to expect, but his mother’s book was old and ragged. Surely Crown City had thousands more wonders for him to discover. The anticipation was almost unbearable.

The stranger had mentioned the Regulators, however—the Watchmaker’s security force. These trusted watchers helped maintain the Stability and stopped anyone from breaking the rules. Owen had never considered them frightening before, but now he realized with a skip of a heartbeat that
he
was a rule breaker.

Sparks showered up from the steel wheels as the brakes on the leading cars clamped down on the rails. Owen saw a transfer station coming up, the rail yards crowded with the business of offloading.

Having come this far, he didn’t want his adventure cut short, not until he got a chance to explore Crown City, see the Clockwork Angels with his own eyes, perhaps even a glimpse of the Watchmaker himself, or the throbbing source of coldfire beneath Chronos Square. The steamliner had slowed significantly, and although the next hedge looked prickly and not at all welcoming, he braced himself and jumped out of the car with far less grace than the manner in which he had climbed aboard.

Where a young man has a chance of making good

E
ach autumn in Barrel Arbor, Owen and his father would rake the fallen leaves from around their cottage into sweet-smelling heaps. On one such afternoon a few years ago, Owen had nearly finished raking when a gust of unexpected wind rushed past and caught up the yellow leaves, swirling them into the air. Laughing, he had run into the midst of the golden whirlwind, holding up his hands as the colors skirled around him.

Crown City was like that.

After the steamliner left him behind, he extricated himself from the hedge, brushed off his clothes, and trudged into the city. The path along the rails turned into a track, and the track became a street. In the space of an hour, he witnessed enough surprises to make his eyes ache, and Crown City engulfed him with its majesty. He wanted to see it all, experience everything. He couldn’t believe he was actually here, whether by accident or determination.

Owen walked past individual warehouses, each of which rivaled the size of his village. Industries hummed with heavy
 
pistons, hydraulic stamping presses, assembly lines—coldfire-driven machinery that manufactured the conveniences and necessities of daily life: efficient vehicles, harvesting machines, mining engines, household gadgets, and alchemical contraptions for the delight and comfort of all the Watchmaker’s people.

Further along, on tree-lined boulevards, he walked past the huddled and secretive buildings of the Watchmaker’s university, where the next generation of engineers and mathematicians learned how they could contribute to the Stability. An image of a honeybee was carved into the keystone of the entrance arch.

In adjacent university buildings, thin smokestacks spewed colored smoke and fumes from various experiments conducted within reinforced laboratories. From his mother’s book, Owen recognized

the Alchemy College, where apprentices struggled against the elements to unlock the chemical secrets of the universe, expanding human knowledge beyond the simplicities of air, water, fire, and earth. Hoping to become members of the Watchmaker’s elite cadre of alchemist-priests, the apprentices worked with metals, salts, acids, rare earths, and even rarer substances that had not yet been named.

Owen looked wistfully at the college buildings, imagining classrooms full of attentive students taught by philosopher-professors. If Owen had been born in a different place, set on a different path, maybe he could have been one of those students. Surely, he possessed the required intellect, or at least the imagination. But he was part of the Watchmaker’s plan, and all was for the best. It wasn’t for him to complain.

He continued to explore the city, greeting everyone he encountered because that was the polite thing to do. They responded in kind but did not pause for a relaxed chat, the way people did during quiet afternoons in Barrel Arbor or evenings in the Tick Tock Tavern. He envied the inhabitants of Crown City, to whom the capital’s marvels were as commonplace as his apple orchards.

Thanks to his familiarity with his mother’s book, he made his way toward Chronos Square, the center of the city, where the Watchmaker had his headquarters. That was where he would find the gigantic clocktower and the Clockwork Angels. Wide streets radiated outward from the square, crossing circular outer boulevards. Owen knew their names: Crown Wheel, Center Wheel, and Balance Wheel . . . a combination of straight paths and perfect circles, all part of a master plan that simple people like Owen could never comprehend.

The buildings grew taller, the streets crowded with people and adorned with awnings, shops, stands. Owen’s neck hurt because he kept turning his head from side to side to absorb everything, like a playful kitten distracted by butterflies in the air. He didn’t keep track of where he was supposed to be, swept along like those golden leaves in the gust of wind.

He strolled past fruit vendors, coffee shops, and market stalls with chalkboards announcing “special sale prices” (although the prices were Stability set, and each vendor was required to charge exactly the same in order to remove the uncertainty of unnecessary competition).

Two workmen with long-handled bristle brushes, pump cans of smelly solvents, and buckets of soapy water stood at the mouth of an alley; the workers seemed embarrassed, rushed. One man squirted solvent on a crudely painted symbol on the brick wall; it was clearly visible from the main street—a large white “A” surrounded by a slapdash circle. After application of the solvent, the paint began to run, melting the symbol—whatever it was. The second worker dunked his brush in the soapy water and furiously scrubbed and scoured, as if trying to take off the surface of the bricks along with the paint. The offending mark vanished under their toil.

Four straight-backed men in dark blue uniforms strode forward like windup soldiers. Each wore a crisp tricorn hat; their jackets were pressed, silver buttons polished, their cuffs the epitome of what a rectangle should be. People moved aside to let them pass, and Owen tried desperately not to call any attention to himself, but he couldn’t hide his stare.

The Watchmaker’s Regulators were renowned enforcers of the Stability. Only the candidates with the most perfect rhythm and timing were accepted into the Blue Watch, who patrolled the streets on a rigid schedule. They walked a prescribed inspection route, eyes forward, seeing everything. They didn’t command adherence to order so much as they demonstrated it.

The Blue Watch walked by, and as they passed, people seemed to stand straighter and go about their business with greater purpose. Owen felt an increased confidence that everything in his life, even this unexpected adventure, was part of an immense and intricate master plan.

Men and women bustled in and out of a large building carrying sheets of paper. The walls were studded with thick hexagonal windows, like a beehive, and a clattering din came from inside, where row after row of automated metal keys clacked on spools of pulp paper—a central newsgraph office, far grander than the Paquettes’ small shop with its single newsgraph machine back in Barrel Arbor. Newsgraph workers ran out and posted the latest releases on public kiosks: service announcements, security alerts, weather reports, and even philosophical pronouncements that rattled into the machines from the Watchmaker’s mind.

At a bookshop next door to the newsgraph office, Owen saw a table stacked high with
The Official Biography of the Watchmaker, Updated Edition
. Each book had a honeybee symbol stamped on the spine, just like the pedlar’s book,
Before the Stability
. Owen flipped through a few pages of the thick volume, promising himself that someday he would sit down and read about the century of Stability and how the Watchmaker had made this the best of all possible worlds. An informative sign noted that the current edition “included events as recent as last week.” By the time Owen got around to reading the book, he supposed it would be much thicker.

For now he had to see Crown City.

Ahead, a woman was trying on hats in front of a shop. The haberdasher hovered beside her. “It looks lovely on you, madam. Absolutely lovely.” The woman cocked the hat one way then another, preening before a small mirror. “But perhaps you should try this blue one,” he said. “It would look magnificent.”The haberdasher extended a hat that was bright scarlet, not blue at all.

The woman took the scarlet hat. She made no comment about its actual color and tried it on. The man said, “Oh, yes, madam— blue is definitely the best fit for you.”

The haberdasher was an old man with arthritic knuckles, a wispy beard, and a wrinkled face. His eyes were folded shut, the lids like soft, wadded suede, and Owen realized the man was blind.

Hesitating, the woman tried on the hat, unsure about its color. “Are you quite certain, sir?”

“Oh, yes, madam. The Watchmaker chose me for this profession. It is my particular skill. Trust me in this, you look beautiful,” said the blind man.

“Very well, then. All is for the best.” She paid the haberdasher and took her new scarlet hat, which did not match the rest of her outfit at all.

Though he was at first surprised, Owen also felt reassured that the Watchmaker’s society was so ordered that even a blind man knew which hats to sell his customers. Trusting in the Stability, the people did exactly as they were expected to.

“And you, young man,” the gruff haberdasher called out, turning his head in Owen’s direction. “For you, a porkpie hat, I think.”

“I . . . I do need a hat.” Owen said. He hadn’t even thought about it when he’d gone out after dark to meet Lavinia.

The haberdasher fumbled among his wares, settled on a gray tweed porkpie hat, felt the rim to check its size, and extended it in Owen’s general direction. The young man placed the hat on his head and admitted that it did look good on him. “How did you know I needed a hat if you can’t see?”

“Because I expected you to come,” the haberdasher said. “How else could I do my business?”

Since Owen didn’t know how much to pay for a hat, he extended a handful of the coins from the nameless stranger. The blind man fumbled among them, plucked a medium-sized coin, and dropped it in a small box on his hat-strewn table. Owen thanked him and continued on his way.

He ate his last apple, although he wanted something more substantial. But despite his growling stomach, he had too many things to see. He could eat later. Besides, he really had no idea how much a meal of roast mutton or a chicken pie might cost.

As he continued toward Chronos Square, astonished by the sheer size of Crown City, he found people gathered in a crowd of laughter and applause. Curious, he peered around shoulders and between arms, standing on tiptoe until he saw a red and gold mechanical marvel inside a glass case framed with varnished wood. The head was made of transparent crystal filled with swirling colored steam; the body was a cluster of spheres and generators, a central boiler brought up to pressure and connected to half a dozen hydraulic arms and curved piston legs. At the end of each copper articulated arm, a wooden drumstick was affixed to a socket; the bent legs were connected to pedals. The entire device was surrounded by drums of a variety of shapes and sizes.

A man with a small mustache and a bright red scarf around his neck stood to the side, beaming with pride at his invention. “I present to you Dr. Russell’s Fabulous Clockwork Percussor! Let us make a joyful noise.”

With a sudden release of steam, the arms began to move, at first randomly, then into an organized sequence of strikes at the array of drums and cymbals. Each limb stretched and moved in a graceful arc, and the whole assemblage created a rat-a-tat sound like some manic, percussive alarm clock.