Clockwork Angels: The Novel (8 page)

In the center of the carnival ground, poles had been strung with ropes for a high-wire acrobatic act. The ringmaster—a man with such a commanding presence that Owen assumed it must be César Magnusson himself—stood wearing a top hat and sleek black tails, with a huge handlebar mustache that seemed a feat in itself. He shouted out above the noise of the crowd in a voice suited to command thunder. “On the wires, our most beautiful angel—Francesca! Watch her death-defying feats of poise and balance. Never before has danger looked so graceful.”

A lissome young woman sprang forward and cartwheeled with the perfection of a smoothly turning gear. She wore a pearlescent white leotard and a decorative white skirt that did not impede her movement. Her flowing black hair looked like a swirling river of ink, tresses that captured the purity of the darkest moonless night. Francesca turned to smile at the audience, revealing that she held a long rose in her teeth. Owen had never seen anyone so beautiful in his entire life.

Like a cat climbing a tree, she ascended the pole on small pegs that were arranged like a ladder’s rungs. Owen saw, and promptly forgot about, a flat pack strapped to her back, cleverly hidden by her hair.

She climbed to the first platform and looked across an imposing narrow rope that extended to the far pole. Higher up, Francesca unfastened a dangling trapeze. With casual breathtaking skill, she wrapped one arm around the bar and swung herself out, gliding forward, then back, like the pendulum in a grandfather clock. She raised herself on strong, slender arms, twirled, and launched herself into the air where she caught the upper rope and used her momentum to swing her body around. She dropped back down and caught the trapeze bar in its arc as if it had been waiting there for her.

Francesca swung again, never once letting the rose fall from her mouth. Then twenty feet above the hard ground, toes pointed straight forward, one foot in front of the other, she walked along the tightrope with as much ease as Owen walked down a street. She seemed to have wings on her heels.

During the performance, he worked his way to the front of the crowd and stood there, his entire world centered on her. He gaped at the sight with his eyes wide and his mouth open like a moonstruck cow. He could think of nothing else, could see nothing else, and when Francesca glanced down at the audience he was certain that she looked right into his eyes. His new porkpie hat fell off, and he scrambled to pick it up.

Raising her hands as if to stretch on a lazy morning, she grabbed the trapeze and swung high. As she came back down, she pushed her legs hard against the elastic tension of the tightrope and catapulted herself into the air. At the apex of her flight, she yanked a tiny string on the front of her costume, and the halfhidden pack on her shoulders burst open to reveal spring-loaded angel wings. They were fashioned from thin slats of aluminum and tin layered one upon the other like giant feathers, and they looked glorious in the light.

On angel wings, Francesca spread her arms and soared downward in ecstatic flight. The wings braked her descent enough that she alighted on the ground with barely a hair out of place. She landed in front of Owen, who could do nothing more than gasp while the rest of the crowd applauded.

With a flourish and a secretive smile, Francesca removed the rose from her mouth and extended it to him. He didn’t know what to say. His hands trembled as he took it, and she rewarded him with a bright burst of laughter, then bounded off, leaving his whole world out of balance.

Owen was so stunned that he didn’t notice the hush that rippled through the crowd. A troop of Regulators, twelve men with perfect tricorn hats and crisp blue uniforms, marched past the game booths, issuing orders to shut down the carnival.

The Blue Watch marched to where César Magnusson stood with his top hat and tails, straight-backed, not looking at all intimidated. “How may I help you gentlemen?” He stroked his long mustache.

“Irregularities were found in your permit,” said the lead Regulator. “Your allotted performance date has expired. By decree of the Watchmaker, you must shut down these operations and remove all items by sundown. You may reapply for a proper performance permit in twenty-four hours.” The Regulator reached into his buttoned jacket and withdrew a citation slip, which he presented to the ringmaster.

Magnusson accepted the paper without protest, took off his top hat, and bowed. “We shall do as the Watchmaker wishes. All is for the best.”

The Watchmaker

While our loving Watchmaker loves us all to death

T
he Watchmaker sat in the highest clocktower in the land of Albion and contemplated the universe.

His chalkboards were covered with equations; worktables held blueprints with precise drawings of how the world should be ordered. In more than a century of Stability (he no longer let the people know exactly how many years it had been), he had accomplished much, but so much more remained to be done. The world was such a large and chaotic place.

His adept engineers and physicists understood cause and effect, the epiphany of straight lines and perfect circles. His alchemistpriests, once considered magicians, understood the clockwork interaction of atoms and elements. But to him, the Watchmaker, fell the greatest responsibility: he was the prime mover, the gear that turned all gears, the precision spring that saved the scattered and inefficient populace of Albion from debilitating disorder.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

He pulled the chair close to his desk with its neatly stacked papers, his ruler and compass, his many-keyed adding engine. From here, he could hear the relentless mechanism of the tower’s huge timepiece, brute-force gears that beat time into submission. The loud ticking provided a rhythm as comforting as a heartbeat, and without variation. Though the Watchmaker’s own pulse might quicken when he thought of a new idea or when he learned news of yet another disruption caused by the Anarchist, the tower’s great clock maintained its perfect tempo. It helped him concentrate.

The Watchmaker was a clean-shaven man with a face full of years that even his own rejuvenation treatments could not erase; the barber came in at precisely 7:30 a.m. every day. His gray hair was cut to what he deemed to be the perfect length. His nails were clipped once a week, manicured exactly even.

At precisely 10:00 a.m., his assistant brought in a tray and poured him a cup of hot tea. The Watchmaker pressed a dipper into a honeycomb in a bowl beside the tea set, then dripped exactly the right amount of golden syrup into his tea. Two complete circle stirs with the silver spoon, and the cup was perfect.

He hated to disrupt the perfect hexagonal wax in the honeycomb, but it was a necessary bit of disorder. The angles, the interlocking chambers in the comb, a natural geometrical perfection rarely seen; it fascinated him. Bees innately understood order, the perfection of geometry. If only people could so instinctively learn the lesson of lowly insects.

And the honey, liquid gold just like the gold his alchemy created—but created through the alchemy of insects, an arcane transformation from nectar by the biological processes of bees. Not even his most brilliant alchemist-priests could reproduce it. The Watchmaker kept his own bees for recreation, for study. Little wonder that he had chosen the bee as his personal symbol, a reminder to all people of the sweet, perfect order of the Stability. . . .

He looked at the blueprints before him—an expanded wing for the Alchemy College; a new steamline spur line to bring in processed copper and molybdenum from the strike in the northeast; a modified design for cargo steamers so they could better weather the storms as they crossed the Western Sea from Atlantis, laden with vital alchemical supplies.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
At 10:30 a.m. the commander of the elite Black Watch marched in and presented his report. “All is well, sir,” he said, as he did every day. “All is as it should be, and all is for the best.”
He handed over a summary document, which the Watchmaker skimmed. It was the same as yesterday and the day before, neatly handwritten with close attention to detail. The Black Watch commander could have used a printing press to run off the document day after day, but the Watchmaker did not encourage complacency, especially with that mad dog, the Anarchist, trying to ruin perfection.
The man had so much potential, so much failure. . . .
The Watch commander departed at 10:45, and the Watchmaker remembered with a sad wistfulness that it was time to walk the dog, as he had done for years. Curled on the rug in his office near the window was his Dalmatian, Martin; a perfect dog, well trained, never a bother, with a white coat and a wonderful randomness of spots (one had to allow for a certain amount of Nature’s unpreventable disorder). The Dalmatian did not shed, was not disruptively playful; he would sit when commanded to do so, and he heeled whenever the Watchmaker called him. Yes, a perfect dog. Martin looked so beautiful there on the rug.
Unfortunately, the clockwork of biology had run down; dog years were different from human years, although when viewed through human eyes, the loss still felt deep and painful to him. Martin had died four years ago. Not wanting to disrupt his daily routine, the Watchmaker had appointed Albion’s best taxidermist to stuff and mount the dog so that he sat, curled up in his accustomed place all day long, a comforting bit of Stability for the Watchmaker himself. He had decided this solution was better than getting a new dog.
Fortunately, his sophistication with the subtleties of alchemy, biological hydraulics, and hair-fine clockwork mechanisms allowed the Watchmaker to overcome even the obstacle of Martin’s death. Opening the locked drawer of his desk, he withdrew an eyedropper filled with an intensely luminous fluid, liquid electricity . . . distilled quintessence.
The dog wasn’t his first experiment, and certainly not his best, but still very important to the Watchmaker. This was
Martin
. He petted the spotted fur on the dog’s back, found the small access hatch that revealed the clockwork heart and hydraulic muscle motivators, and squeezed two drops of the shimmering fluid into the animation battery.
He just had time to seal the hidden access hatch again and replace the eyedropper in the drawer before Martin became active, rising up on his four legs, wagging his tail in a perfect metronome. The Watchmaker smiled. So much better than a real dog’s regrettable messes or spontaneous behavior.
He caught himself pondering, listening to the heavy ticking of the huge clock. 10:55 a.m.—time to visit his alchemist-priests for the daily inspection. “Come on, Martin. Let’s go for your walk.”

Crown City was the heart of Albion, and Chronos Square was the heart of Crown City. In the catacombs beneath the great clocktower, the Watchmaker could see the actual alchemical heart of the world beating. His coldfire source.

Cleverly concealed conduits beneath the cobblestoned streets delivered energy throughout the city, powering steam boilers, illuminating street lamps, heating homes, powering hospitals. The alchemist-priests had created a great vaulted chamber in the catacombs, the nexus of all the coldfire that kept his Stability stable. The people lacked for nothing, and the machinery of society ran on well-oiled gears.

The Watchmaker walked purposefully, with the dog pacing beside him in a stiff, measured gait. He could hear the ticking of Martin’s mechanisms, the movement of not-quite-smooth gears in his major joints. He believed even this semblance of the dog enjoyed the daily walk, however, and he himself was reassured that all was as it should be, and forever.

His chief alchemist-priests, ten of them—because that was a perfect round number—maintained the pulsing coldfire heart. They added the prescribed amount of sulfur and antimony, mercury, natrium, and their associated distillates, crystallizations, and powdered allotropes. They followed the reaction recipes as specified in great tomes filled with alchemical symbols.

The spells and rituals were the height of modern science. In a release of elemental empathy, a change of synergy, the blissful chemical reactions powered the city’s underground turbines. A crackle left the air with the metallic scent of ozone after a thunderstorm. Several alchemist-priests covered their faces with scarves to ward off the chemical fumes, but to the Watchmaker, the aroma was a mixture of hope and potential, although not everyone could smell it. His eyes didn’t even water.

More than a century ago, the city had been a riot of smokestacks and slums. People crowded together in squalid conditions. Murder, sickness, even plagues swept the underclasses. Countless industrial accidents, uncontrolled fires, horrendous mayhem—it was every man for himself in a lawless, sprawling “civilization” that proved to be anything but civilized.

Amidst that turmoil, the man who had become the Watchmaker organized his research and gathered a team of adept alchemists to begin methodical investigations. And finally they found the Philosopher’s Stone, which allowed him to turn common metals into gold.

For a simpler man, the dreams would have ended there. He would have made himself wealthy, built a palace, and relaxed in a fine life. For the Watchmaker, however, that was only the first step. He manufactured immense quantities of gold, built a stockpile greater than the greediest dragon’s imaginary hoard, and swept into Crown City with wagonloads of riches. He simply purchased everything he needed, every building, every factory, in such a swift and methodical manner that he controlled the city before the economy collapsed under a blizzard of cheap gold.