The White City (33 page)

He went to the next door and the next, opening each one only to see more desks. When they came to the final door at the end of the hallway, he cried, “They’re just offices!”

“Must have been the other direction,” Si said.

The three peered back down the hallway. Dozens of clockwork men filled the passage, marching closer and blocking their exit. Conker’s face knotted fiercely. He lifted the Nine Pound Hammer. “Stay behind me.”

He rushed toward the automatons, swinging the hammer. The heavy iron head clattered on their armor. Metal twisted. Steam hissed. As several automatons took hold of Conker’s arms, Ray feared the clockwork men would overwhelm Conker. But with a roar, Conker wrenched his arms free and quickly swung the hammer around. Brass heads and molded arms snapped from the nearest clockwork men. The ones coming behind were soon unable to reach Conker through the mass of broken automatons.

Conker leaned his huge body into the pile of smashed and severed parts. Pushing and grunting, he reached wide to contain the heap. Step by heavy step, he drove the tide of automatons back with all his strength. Ray and Si followed behind him as pieces fell to the ground around them, severed limbs, gears and forged parts, molded plates from shoulders, chests, and legs.

After several yards, Conker forced the wall of clockwork men back onto the exhibit floor. With one last heave, he released them. The broken bodies fell in a heap. Clockwork men beyond fought to climb over.

“Run!” he roared, bringing up the hammer.

Ray and Si squeezed past and raced down the aisle but saw more of the clockwork men coming toward them.

“We’re trapped!” Si said.

Ray looked back to where Conker was pummeling with the hammer, swing after powerful swing. A solid blow to the head or chest was enough to destroy an automaton, but as Ray saw the sheer numbers coming at them, he feared that Conker could not keep up the fight. In the hallway, he had used the limited space to their advantage, but here, with more and more of the automatons surrounding them, they were cornered.

“Get behind me,” Conker said. Ray and Si backed against the wall as Conker fought the semicircle of clockwork men closing around them. As fast as he brought one automaton down, another would clamber forward. Metal hands clutched at Conker’s arms. Some fallen and half-working men grabbed his legs. Conker cried out as he fought, tearing the mechanical men away and trying to get back from the swell.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Si said. “Can’t we cross now?”

“We’ve got to get to those stairs,” Ray said. “Otherwise, we’ll wind up crushed in the Machine.”

“Well, Conker can’t hold all of them off!” Si cried.

Ray handed her the lantern and stepped closer to Conker. He had stopped the Hoarhound. Were these clockwork men so different? He grasped the toby. It trembled and grew warm. Tingling spread out from his chest, sending the pulsations through his body and down his arms. He could feel them, these devices of the Gog.

He understood now. The toby drew the power of the
Gloaming. With its powerful and rare objects of the wild, each selected and made potent through Ray’s hoodoo craft, the toby was every bit the opposite of the Gog’s forged servants. His body, his hands, held a repellent force to those mechanical warriors.

Ray reached Conker’s side. The giant was trying to swing the hammer, but too many hands clutched him now. Clockwork men clung to his back and neck, pulling him down.

A clockwork man leaped at Ray. The energy Ray had summoned erupted from his palms. The invisible force crushed in the shell of the clockwork man’s body. Ray reached out with his hands, extending his palms to the automatons around Conker. A tension, like the resistance of like-charged magnets put too close together, pushed against his hands. Ray gritted his jaw and leaned forward.

Clockwork men swung their expressionless slotted eyes to him before their brass skulls crinkled and were crushed flat. Ray brought his hands around to Conker, and a cluster of the men flew from him, repelled or compressed until the mass was driven back.

Conker broke free and beat down with his hammer. “Let’s go!” he shouted. Ray dropped his hands. They turned and ran with Si, leaping over the broken automatons. Only a handful of clockwork men remained, but others—dozens more—came down the rows.

Carrying the lantern, Si led them to the far corner of the hall. “It must be down here!” she said.

They turned the corner. The hallway had no doors except one at the far end. Ray panted as he ran, the exertion of calling up the power to drive back the clockwork men weighing
down on him. The
click-click-click
of brass feet marched behind them. Ray was exhausted and worried he could not stop the Gog’s guardsmen again.

Si opened the door, where a narrow set of stairs circled down into the dark. As Ray followed her, Conker slammed the door behind them. “There’s no way to lock it!” he shouted.

Si called out, “It stops down here. No door. Nothing! We’re trapped!”

Ray looked around the bend in the stairs to see the flat brick wall.

Conker grabbed the handle of the door. Behind it, Ray could hear the buzz and grinding of the clockwork men coming closer. Conker spread his feet wide, clutching the handle and leaning back.

Ray took the last few steps down to the bottom. Si held up the lantern and looked around with wide eyes. “Where do we go?”

A boom resounded from the door up the stairwell, and Ray heard the door groaning as the clockwork men tried the pry the door open from Conker’s grasp.

“We’ve got to cross,” Ray said, heading back up the stairs to Conker.

“Here!” Si said, following him.

“Conker,” Ray said. “Get ready!”

“What about Si?” Conker gazed at her fearfully as he struggled to hold on to the breaking door. The wood cracked, and the hinges whined.

“There’s no choice,” Ray said. “She comes with us.”

His fingers darkened as feathers formed. His body transformed,
compressing into the form of a crow. As Ray flew down the stairs and circled to come back up, Si grabbed the lantern. Conker let go of the door and leaped to Si, holding her. Ray clutched their shoulders with his talons. Conker and Si disappeared. The door broke open, and clockwork men poured into the room.

Ray flew at the wall at the bottom of the stairs. Lights flashed and the noise of the clockwork men’s machinery vanished.

Darkness swallowed him.

Ray knew they were somewhere on the Wolf Tree. But it was not in the branches. His wings felt weighed down by some terrible force. He toppled against bark, which was soft and rotten and came apart in his feathers.

Down they went. Ray saw flashes of light again.

Falling to a metal girder floor, Ray returned to his form. Conker and Si reappeared and toppled to the floor. The three lay panting. Ray felt dizzy and sick to his stomach. It took all his effort to open his eyes and lift his head from the floor.

The room was small with a ceiling and walls of metal. Except for a spare incandescent bulb mounted next to an open doorway, it was empty. The air was hot and reeked of oil smoke. A constant rumbling noise seemed to cause the floor to vibrate slightly beneath them.

Si took Ray by the shoulder. “You okay?”

The battle with the clockwork men and the effort of crossing had draining him. Ray had to fight to keep from slipping into unconsciousness.

With the Nine Pound Hammer in his hands, Conker stood to walk over to the doorway. He peered down and then looked back at them with wide eyes. As Si picked up the lantern and joined him, her gasp brought Ray to his senses. He rose stiffly and staggered over to his friends.

“Where are we?” Si whispered.

A spiral staircase wound down from the doorway to an enormous grid of conveyor belts and assembly tables that were lit by a network of spare electric bulbs mounted on poles. The room stretched out in every direction, fading into a haze of smoke and dimness. Filling the aisles of the factory floor were gray ghostlike workers, piecing together bits of machinery coming down the belts, oiling small parts, inserting dials and levers, and returning their work to the moving platform before taking another part to assemble. What purpose their individual tasks served, Ray could not tell. But he knew each piece was part of the larger Machine, something to be added to the evergrowing engine of the Gog’s soul.

“We’ve reached the Gloaming,” Ray said. “Or at least what the Gog has turned it into.”

He looked up to see that their room was mounted into a ceiling of exposed rock and tangled roots. Conker said, “I guess we go down.”

“I’m ready,” Ray said, taking a deep breath. He was still winded and leaned on Si’s shoulder as they followed Conker down the staircase.

The hot, fume-laden air was filled with the sound of whirling belts, churning gears, heaving valves of steam, and the incessant chug of some dark industry. Ray heard larger machines beating and pounding and could only imagine some
foundry somewhere out there constructing the pieces of machinery for these workers to assemble.

As they reached the factory floor, workers turned to stare at them. Ashen-gray men, women, and children stood along a long aisle of machinery. They had no color, like people plucked from a blurry daguerreotype. Their hair was bleached and their skin drawn and sallow as if years had borne down on them, beyond whatever natural age they were.

The people paused only a moment to gaze blankly at Ray, Conker, and Si. Then they returned to their work.

“Who are you?” Conker asked a man working nearby.

The man cast a fearful glance at Conker over his shoulder. His cracked lips and toothless mouth worked to make words, but no sound came out except for a dry gasping. After wincing and hunching away from Conker, the man returned to clamping metal plates over small casings of gears no bigger than what would operate a pocket watch.

“The Darkness … has done this to them,” Ray said. “They are servants to the Machine now.”

“How can we help them?” Si asked, her eyes on a small boy sliding cogs onto tiny rods.

“We can’t,” Ray said.

“We can destroy the Machine,” Conker said. “Wherever it is.”

He furrowed his brow and looked around at the conveyor belts. “We got to find where these parts are being sent.” He started down the aisle following the stream of machinery.

With Si’s help, Ray followed him. They passed workers who cast anxious looks then busied themselves at their posts. After a hundred yards, they reached a place where the conveyor
belts dumped the parts into a wide chute. It made an intersection, and looking to the right and left, Ray saw chutes at the ends of all the rows.

Conker leaned over to look down into the hole. “I think there’s another floor below us.”

“Let’s hope there are stairs—” Si started to say, but Conker pulled her and Ray back.

A few aisles down, a clockwork man crossed an intersecting walkway and disappeared down a row of workers. “They’re guarded here too,” Conker said. “Let’s head the other way.”

They hurried down the aisle, wandering through the enormous buzzing grid. They passed more of the chutes and eventually saw mechanical lifts cut into the floor lowering large containers of the assembled parts.

Ray felt they were utterly lost. He could no longer see the spiral staircase rising up to the room where they had arrived. Just when he began to suspect they were passing the same workers again and again, Si said, “There it is.”

The aisle ended at a circular stairwell in the floor. “Let’s go,” Conker said, leading the way down.

“More workers,” Si said at the next floor. She began to continue down the stairs.

“Wait,” Ray said. A worker had stepped back, showing his face in profile. Then he had moved close to the machinery, disappearing behind the other workers around him.

“What is it?” Conker asked.

Ray walked forward slowly until he stood behind the worker. He was a boy, about Sally’s age. At his back, Ray could see that his hair had not turned completely gray. Faint hues of
brown showed. Ray touched a hand to his shoulder. The boy flinched, spinning around.

“Gigi,” Ray gasped.

The boy’s mouth opened and closed. He struggled to speak, and his words came thin and distant. “Ra-a-ay. Is tha-a-at yo-o-ou?”

“Gigi,” Ray said, taking the boy’s arms. “Why are you here?”

“My fa-a-amily.” Gigi’s gaze drifted to his left, and Ray saw men working at his side, one older and several who seemed about his age. Gigi’s father. His brothers. They had all been brought here along with the other workers from Omphalosa.

Gigi took something from his pocket and held it up for Ray. The black bat-shaped seedpod. The charm Hethy had given Gigi to protect him against the Darkness. In Omphalosa, it had worked. But here in the Gloaming, shackled to the Gog’s machinery, Gigi was becoming like the others—a wispy phantom, soulless, little more than the shell of a person.

“Ray!” Conker said.

A clockwork man stood at the stairwell, the blank slots of its eyes locked on them. “Don’t do anything,” Si whispered, putting down the lantern.

The clockwork man walked forward, brass feet resounding on the metal floor. Ray tensed as it approached. Tiny gears buzzed as it cocked its head. A tinny sound came from the little cone in its mouth. “Back to work,” it said.

Si nodded to Conker and Ray and then turned to squeeze between two workers at their posts. Conker pushed in beside Si, and Ray stepped between Gigi and his father. The clockwork man remained at Ray’s back, hovering, and as Ray cast an eye
back, the automaton just stood, watching him with its blank face.

Ray stole a glance over to see what Gigi was doing. The boy took a metal part from a box and attached some dials to its side while his father bolted on a lever. Ray reached into a bucket that had stopped on the assembly belt before him. He took out a small tin part, open on one side for the dials to be inserted. Ray reached over to the other box, where Gigi had taken out the dials. He stared at the pieces, not knowing what to do with them. Before he could work it out, hatred welled up in him.

This was for the Gog’s Machine. He was doing a part, even a small part, in helping it operate. Helping it generate the Darkness. Helping it enslave more victims.