Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables (15 page)

Halprin scrambled backward toward the front door, rolling to scoop up his fallen gun, saying, “Look at what you’ve done to this place. Look at what you’ve reaped by your meddling.”

“This is what
you
have done, coward!” the soldier shouted back. “You sent your machines against innocent people, and it was other machines that stopped them.”

Halprin swung the gun’s muzzle around. The soldier ducked behind the wreckage of the dog as the gun coughed and then stuttered silent.

The ground continued to shiver and heave as he glanced over the ruined machine beast. Halprin threw down the useless gun and turned for the doorway.

Outside, a swift shadow bolted toward the doorway, half-hidden in rising sun. The soldier drew his revolver from his belt, aimed over the back of his fallen hound, and squeezed the trigger.

As the hammer dropped, the streak of brown and gold rammed into Halprin’s legs and he tripped, tumbling headfirst out the doorway as the soldier’s bullet passed through the air his head had recently occupied.

The soldier cursed, jumped up, and ran for the doorway, stumbling across the bucking floor. Scout darted inside and dragged the soldier out of the building behind Halprin. The soldier tried to shake the mechanical dog away, furious and set on taking his enemy’s life.

Outside, Halprin scrambled to his feet and tried to run across the shuddering ground as Scout harried the soldier aside.

A shadow fell on Halprin and he glanced up, then froze at what he saw.

Juggernaut, dripping oil and water, his metal skin torn open and blasted by steam and gunpowder, let out a howl as of a million angry souls shouting for vengeance, and leaped on Halprin with his iron jaw agape.

Halprin shrieked in terror as the giant creature fell upon him and crushed him to the ground. A cloud of dirt and metal flew into the air, knocking the soldier and Scout backward as the massive dog came to rest at last.

His breath heaving in his chest, the soldier pulled himself up by holding on to Scout—filthy, dented, indomitable Scout, the last remaining dog. He stood there still, his revolver loose in his hand, when Sarah and the citizens of Stone Crossing arrived, by foot, on horseback, or riding on the crawling wagons with their battered engines.

Sarah took in the wreckage all around, the broken dogs, the warehouse as tumbledown as a shanty, and the sickening remains
of Halprin. Then she looked to her beloved soldier, sorrowful and unmoving with Scout beside him.

She took his hand and drew him closer to her. “Did you shoot him?” she asked in a soft voice. “I’m sorry if you had to.”

“I didn’t kill him. It was the dogs. Even torn to shreds they did not stop.”

“You told them to protect us and they did.”

The soldier shook his head in wonder and sorrow. “I never ordered them to kill. I never ordered them to protect
me
. Their duty was to you—to all of you. Hollow hounds they may have been, but they had hearts the size of giants’.”

S
arah took her soldier back to Stone Crossing, where they were married at Christmastime. They lived in the town for many years, filling the house with children and dogs, but it was always the one dog, the odd one with the metal hide like dirty pennies, that the soldier kept at his side. Two of a kind: their mechanical hearts wound up by something more than a key.

“T
his is the devil’s own bargain you are forcing upon me, Warner Gilead, and you shall come to rue this day!”

The man thus addressed—a specimen of the pure-quill Newport-summering plutocrat, yet, surprisingly, not flashily attired, overweening, nor lofty, but rather clad in a mourning suit, enervated, and plainly brought low (in spirits, if not in status) by circumstance—refused the aggression proffered by his angry interlocutor. Warner Gilead seemed drained for the nonce of whatever spunk and vim had once propelled him to that hypothetical stratosphere of society which the remnants of his self-assured mien and sober finery proclaimed he still inhabited. He had apparently lost or misplaced his zest for living, and now moved through the affairs of his own life like a ghost seeking what can never be regained.

The intemperate, gaunt-faced gentleman offering the prediction of ill fortune wore a moderately priced, slightly shabby set of
tweeds, and exhibited the educated manner of a skilled professional of some sort—lawyer, teacher, or perhaps architect. But an alert observer would have noticed that the man’s blunt-fingered hands had been scarred by sharp objects and burned by chemicals, and still hosted ineradicable grease beneath their nails, thus marking him as some sort of chemist or engineer or artificer.

The scene hosting the two antagonists—Gilead seated, the other man standing—was a dark-paneled, book-lined office with tall windows offering a view from above onto Boston’s busy Charles Street. Past the raised sashes, riding the spring breezes, came a welter of peddlers’ cries, carriage wheels rumbling, and the excited cries of children frolicking.

Before choosing his response to the accusation of driving an infernal deal, Warner Gilead stroked his bushy salt-and-pepper side-whiskers thoughtfully. He regarded his opponent coolly, as might one who mentally weighs the penal consequences of murder against the satisfaction afforded by the deed. Finally deciding against such an act of passion, for which he had not, if truth be told, the adequate zeal, Gilead said, “Rather, Hedley, I think I am being extremely merciful and generous in my offer, considering that you stole my wife away from me, and then could not save her when she was in extremis.”

Hedley King—for such was the full name of Gilead’s younger correspondent—blanched at this thrust. His face betrayed a blend of anguish, guilt, and self-reproach.

“Damn you, Gilead! How was I to predict a breech birth followed by uterine rupture! I had a competent midwife in the house, but Pella’s condition would have been too much for even a professional obstetrician. She died so damnably fast! But did I not rush the baby straight to your man at Massachusetts General Hospital, as soon as we abandoned hope for Pella?”

“Yes, where the child was saved only by the intervention of my good friend Dr. Warren, and where the infant has remained safely ever since. And of course, Dr. Warren’s genius and expertise would have been at the disposal of dear Pella from the start, had you not—”

Hedley King interrupted. “Listen to me, you self-deluding old coot! Pella and I fell in love! Such things happen, without intent or machination. Pella left you to be with me. After a year together, she chose to bear me a child. The sad outcome of this chain of events, we both know. But the guilt, if any, rests just as firmly with your beloved Pella and with you as it does with me. If you had not turned so adamantly away from her, she might have felt welcome at your damn fine hospital—”

Gilead considered this observation, the truthfulness of which he was too honest a soul to deny.

“I am sorry to reopen these still-fresh wounds, Hedley. Please forgive me. It’s just that Pella—No, I’ll speak no further on that subject. Let us simply conclude our business, and then we will not have to associate any longer.”

Gilead withdrew two impressively thick legal documents from the center drawer of the desk at which he sat, and took up a pen. Standing on the far side of the big desk, Hedley King watched his rival warily, as if convinced that Gilead was about to trigger some infernal device that would suicidally blast them both into flinders.

Dipping the pen into a pot of ink, Gilead said, “Let me show my good faith by first voluntarily signing the papers transferring to you all the patents pertaining to your invention. Though I do not believe I will hand the document over to you until you have signed your own contract.”

Gilead suited deed to words. He regarded King for some sign of appreciation, but King’s glare indicated the man was still grudging.

“A fine state of affairs, to have to barter for my own intellectual property.”

“Come, now, Hedley, you know full well that your invention was funded entirely by me, and involved important contributions from my partner, Mr. Blanchard. You worked strictly at my behest and as my employee, using my facilities.”

“Bah! I’m no one’s wage slave! I’m a sovereign creator! And as for Thomas Blanchard, he’s a doddering old has-been! His glory
days are behind him. When did he invent his foolish ‘horseless carriage’? Just over two dozen years ago, in 1825! And where has he gotten with it since? Nowhere! All he did for me was to perfect the process for machining the pressure-resistant capsules that contain the vril. Every other aspect of the Morphic Resonator is mine! Mine alone!”

“Be that as it may, your claims would not hold up in a court of law without this legal transference of the patents. So now you have what you most desire, and so shall kindly grant me the same.”

Gilead turned the second document toward King, and proffered the pen. King snatched the stylus, found the relevant page of the contract, and scratched his name with an angry vigor.

“There! The child is now all yours! My own flesh and blood, bartered like a sack of oats! Now give me those patents!”

King irritably plucked up the document his rival had signed, and paged through it roughly to be certain of its terms. Gilead, however, took up the other sheaf of papers tenderly, as if he were lifting the baby itself.

“The boy is only half your flesh, Hedley. Pella’s contribution is not to be diminished. And as she was still my wife when she died—you two not having trifled with such formalities—I could have made a good case for instant legal custody of the child. But as you were irrefutably the father, you might have contested my claim and caused me a long and aggravated court battle, depriving me of crucial formative years with my son. But now I can begin to raise the child from his earliest days, free from your stain and influence.”

“Raise him as you will, Gilead! His sinews and cells are still half mine!”

“That hardly matters, I think, given that the terms of our agreement call for you never to see him again.”

Hedley King’s impudence and arrogance dissipated somewhat, and he seemed crestfallen at the finality of this edict. He turned away and moved toward the exit of the study.

At the door, he paused, and said mildly, “We planned to name the child Roland—”

“I don’t care what you planned. My heir will be named Brannock. That was his mother’s maiden name, one of many facts about Pella concerning which you probably never even deigned to inquire.”

Now Hedley King’s anger flared afresh. “Curse you, Gilead! You may have made it impossible for me to attempt to see the child ever again. But what will you do when he wants to see me?”

King stormed out on that note, leaving Gilead to sit and contemplate with nebulous unease the dawning of such an impossible day.

A
t age thirteen, Brannock Gilead (Bran to his chums and teachers and servants and shopkeepers—to all, in fact, but his stern father) presented the inviting appearance of a handsome young fellow, tall for his age and rather more gracile than muscular, with sensitive lips and deeply pooled brown eyes. These two features he knew he had inherited from his mother, Pella, for a large hand-tinted ambrotype of her beautiful face dominated the parlor of his Charles Street home. Bran had spent endless hours musing over that visage captured in silver on glass—serene on the surface, yet with hints of lurking unease and stifled ambition. He tried to imagine speaking with this dead woman, asking her all the questions about his own heritage that he had saved up since earliest childhood—questions that his implacable surviving parent simply would not countenance.