Mechanica (2 page)

A bookshelf on the far side of the room completely covered the wall. It sagged into a smile under the weight of its leather-bound occupants. Stuck in amid the books, a desk sat draped with haphazard stacks of paper and half-finished diagrams. A pair of glass and leather goggles rested on top of one blank sheet, still dusted in soot. I recalled the pale rings around Mother’s eyes.

I jumped when the room’s thick silence broke. A small chest on a low shelf thunked once, and again, in a determined beat.

I sighed, relieved that no one had discovered me. But what lay in that dark box?

Years of unhappiness had made me fearless. I expected a family of rats, and when the thing in the chest scurried into shadows as I opened the lid, I assumed I was correct.

Then I heard the soft whirring of gears, and my nervousness dissolved into delight. I had found another of Mother’s creations.

I lowered my palm gently into the box. I found myself cooing and nickering to the thing inside, as if it were a shy cat.

“Come on, now,” I said quietly. “It’s all right. I won’t hurt you.” I turned my gaze politely away.

I felt a delicate nipping at my little finger and had to laugh at the sensation. Something rounded pressed against my palm, and I looked down.

A metal horse nuzzled my finger. No taller than my hand at the shoulder, he was the most delicate little toy I had ever seen . . . and yet more than a toy: he moved of his own volition, and the way he regarded me was more than lifelike—it was life itself.

He was made with too much care, too much precision, to be intended only as a plaything. His head and neck were copper gone a bit green, and his flanks were blown glass. Through them, I could see his clockwork musculature turning back and forth as he pranced beneath my fingers; there was even a tiny clock face that looked as if it had been taken from a small pocket watch. He had no mane, but a tail of silver chains that he flicked back and forth and lifted for balance when he moved. Etched into his right flank was the name
Jules II.
Subtle puffs of steam blew from his nostrils. When I stroked his belly, I felt the heat of some inner furnace.

The chest that held little Jules was, in fact, a sort of stable in miniature. There was a bottle of oil and a rag in one corner. A crinkle of green patina, his outline, blossomed in another; he had clearly lain dormant for years. How had he known to awaken? And what else could my entrance have aroused in my mother’s world of mechanical wonders?

I lifted Jules from his confinement and set him gently on the floor. He reared up on his steel haunches and looked at me pointedly. We regarded each other.

Then he set off at a canter toward the far corner of the room. I followed—though I paced him easily, of course, even when he broke into a jingling gallop. I felt as if I’d stumbled into Faerie.

Jules halted in front of yet another door, just as subtly set into the wall as the first had been. This one was wider, and streaked in places with dried grease.

I saw a smudged black handprint among the streaks. When I placed my own hand there, it matched exactly. I knew even before I pushed the door open that here was where Mother kept her workshop and the first room was simply a designer’s studio, a repository.

I opened the door, and more gears sprang to my aid. The hissing was louder in here, and the air was humid with steam.

Jules pranced eagerly at my feet, his metal hooves clacking against the stone floor. Before me lay a world of possibilities.

It was hard to breathe, at first, in the steam-thickened air, and harder still to see. I stumbled a few steps farther inside as that door closed itself behind me too, and reached down to stroke Jules. Somehow the touch of his hard, warm back made me stand a little surer on my feet.

The rumbling quieted, and the air began to clear. I caught sight of an orange glow at the far side of the room, growing slowly brighter.

Jules saw it too. He let out a pleased whinny—an odd, scraped-glass sound that made my spine tense—and cantered toward the glow.

A furnace. Heat radiated from it and pressed against my face as I approached.

Squinting, I could see where the fire continued to grow and grow at its center, colors changing from deep orange to yellow to white, and something whiter than white in a spot at its very middle, almost blue. The warmth felt good on my skin, seeping through my thin linen dress, as if it were opening me up somehow, readying me to be molded and reworked, like metal.

I saw gloves hanging on an iron hook to one side of the furnace, and I put them on. Of course they fit, just as Mother’s sooty handprint on the door had.

Next to the gloves, a series of iron wheels sat built in among the furnace’s bricks. I touched one and found I could rotate it easily. It clicked as I spun it down. The furnace rumbled again, its heat lessening slightly. The rough warmth left my cheeks and forehead, and I immediately missed it. I was in love with the furnace already.

I knew, though, that there were other things left to discover, so I turned away and tried not to long for its almost-burn on my face.

I let the fire heat my back as I surveyed the rest of the room. There was a huge leather bellows attached to pulleys that ran up into the low ceiling. I was sure I could control the bellows with one of the iron wheels on the furnace’s other side.

Steel and copper sheets lined one wall, somehow mostly unoxidized, even after all the years since Mother’s death. Beyond them were shelves stacked with boxes labeled in Mother’s spidery handwriting or slotted with glass windows so I could glimpse their contents. I saw more gears, screws, nails, hinges and joints and pistons, bottles of oil and grease and paints: everything that a mechanic of Mother’s caliber might need.

Between the shelves and the far wall were dozens—no, probably hundreds—of cubbyholes and drawers, tiny and tinier. I opened them, of course. I wanted to see everything Mother had left me, absolutely everything.

But they contained only drifts of ash, pale gray and so fine, it flowed like liquid when I pulled the drawers open. Metal label holders under each held drawings, rather than the neatly scripted labels on the larger boxes and shelves.

They were pictures, sketched in worn black ink, of animals. The first were of insects and other crawlers—spiders, beetles, butterflies—then came lizards, fish, canaries, bats. Larger animals, too: cats and hounds and birds of prey. Horses.

And the ash in the drawers I’d opened . . . it
moved.

I thought I’d imagined it at first, but as I looked closer, it rippled and swirled, then rose into ghostly shapes too vague for me to recognize. It trembled upward, toward me. I put out a hand to meet it, but it cringed suddenly backwards and settled again.

Warm as I was, I shivered.

I looked down toward my feet, but Jules hadn’t followed me to this side of the room. He was backed against the furnace wall, his bright ears flat against his head. His slender clockwork legs stood straight and unmoving, and if he’d had muscles, I would have sworn they were tense. I hadn’t been much around horses in years, but anyone could have seen he was frightened.

“All right, boy.” I hadn’t been much around horses, true, but I still knew how to speak soothingly to one. “We don’t have to stay here; don’t worry.” I crossed to the furnace and picked him up, wincing as the fire-heated glass of his flanks met the thin skin on my palm. I hoped I wouldn’t blister.

I could feel him . . .
relax
. . . in my hand, as if he had muscles after all. The whirring ticks of his mechanisms, what I would almost have called his heartbeat, slowed down.

He calmed further when I brought him back to the studio. I reluctantly laid him in his stable-box, and he settled down in his corner.

He glanced up at me through those intelligent eyes just for a moment. I caught myself thinking he was sad to see me go.

Then he closed them, and I watched his clockwork wind down. Framed there in his little stable, he was so much like the ink-drawn horse on that drawer in the other room. Both of them, I thought, looked almost lonely.

I was being foolish, of course. Mother’s most lucrative trade had been in mechanical creatures like this: automated beetles and butterflies that fashionable ladies wore in their hair or pinned to their dresses. Her best insects could be trained to do simple things like light candles and draw curtains. She always insisted that the insects were simply machinery, though—she said only her most gas-headed customers treated them as pets. I, too, had grown fond of the little ratcheting creatures Mother showed me when I was young, but I’d always believed she was right. Even the trainable ones were no more responsive or affectionate than any real beetles or dragonflies I’d seen.

But I’d only known she made insects, not larger, more intelligent animals. Not horses.

And the look in Jules’s glass eyes . . . but I turned away.

It was verging on daybreak, judging by the thin, gray streaks of light starting to leak through the workshop’s one narrow window. I retreated to the door and turned the handle, letting the gears overhead take most of its weight.

Leaving the workshop was like pulling away from my mother’s embrace. My skin prickled, and my clothes seemed to hang looser on my frame now that I’d left the warmth of the furnace behind. But I had no time for dallying. It was silliness to start missing Mother again, when I felt closer to her than I had since her death.

I climbed the stairs slowly, so they wouldn’t creak. Before I closed the door, I took a last moment to peer down into the shadowed well of the cellar.

I took a breath, and blew out my candle.

M
OTHER
wrote that letter seven years before I read it. She knew she was dying; she had time to prepare. She didn’t give me the same luxury.

But beginnings should go at the beginning. Let me start a bit earlier.

The beginning for me, really, was my mother.

She died when I was nine years old.

She was a great mechanic, and a greater inventor. Father made his fortune trading her work in Nordsk and the Sudlands—even in Faerie, before the quarantine. But he did good trade here in Esting, too; her little mechanical insects, set with jewels and forged from precious metals, were cherished in court. By the time I turned six, I had started helping her repair them.

The first time Father came home and saw Mother and me working together in the library, our arms smudged with grease, her brown and my blue eyes bright with interest and excitement, he laughed.

“She’s not a miniature of you, Margot, you know,” he said.

Mother glanced at me, dark hair falling in her eyes, and she brushed my own brown hair from my face. “Isn’t she?” she asked.

Father laughed again, but his laughter was hard. “Surely we should think about a governess for her soon. She’ll need to be ready for finishing school in a few years.”

Mother looked up. “Certainly she will not,” she said. “Nicolette will never be ready for finishing school. My parents shuffled me off to one of those places, and it nearly finished
me.
”

She always did love dramatics.

Father knew when he was bested, and with Mother, that was often. He nodded slowly, turning over the idea of an unfinished daughter in his mind. “A Sistren governess, at least,” he countered.

I was looking down at the silver dragonfly in my hands, at the wing joint I’d been oiling, and I did not look up. But even very young children know their parents this well: I could
hear
Mother shake her head.

“I won’t have those fastidious zealots under my roof, and you know it, William. I’ll finish Nicolette myself, in my own way. I can teach her more than those simpering wimple-clad governesses ever could.”

I could hear Father raise his hands in surrender too. “All right, Margot. The Lord knows she’s more your child than mine, anyway.”

I was. I am.

And so Mother became my teacher—though in truth, she was already. Ever since I could remember, she had read to me from her notes, had drawn blueprints based on the fanciful ideas I whispered to her in the library, and had given me gears and tools to play with. I was never allowed in her workshop, though. Father insisted it was too dangerous, and in this, at least, they managed to agree.

But even after her longest days in the shop—days I’d spend trailing after our kindly half-Fey housekeeper, Mr. Candery—Mother always visited me before I went to sleep. She came to my room to tell me her versions of bedtime stories. Instead of parables or Faerie tales, she fed me biographies of great scientists and mathematicians and philosophers, or histories of Nordsk, the Sudlands, and Faerie.

“When did we first discover Faerie?” I asked Mother one night, snuggling down into the large—ocean-huge, to my small self—bed in which I then slept. My stepsisters claimed it, like so much else, after Father died.

Mother nodded, knowing she’d told me a dozen times before. To get her to repeat a story, though, I had to find a different question every time, a different angle from which we could enter the tale. It was like fixing a machine so it ran better than it had before it was broken, she said; you had to be willing to forget what it had done before and look for what it
could
do.