CHAPTER 8
Despite her exhaustion from the ordeal of the previous night on the steamliner, Marinda slept only fitfully in her unexpected lodgings. This wasn’t her bed, wasn’t her home, and it was only the beginning of this part of her task. (Her father would have called it an “adventure,” no doubt.) Crown City was the heart of legends, exotic sights, possible epiphanies, almost certain intimidation.
She found herself alone in a strange metropolis, but she had always been able to take care of herself. So far, she had survived the crash of a steamliner and, worse, she had survived the true story of her father and mother. It was time to fill her book with other tales, ones that weren’t so personal. Yes, that would be much safer.
At first you will hate me for this. Then you will love me for it.
“We’ll just see about that,” Marinda said to herself.
After she washed and put on the clean set of clothes from the battered valise, she left at dawn, telling the sleepy innkeeper to keep her room available so she would have a place to come back to. She would need several days at least to complete her task, she knew, and the knowledge that she had a temporary home, no matter what she encountered during the day, gave her one sure point of stability, and her life now had few enough of those.
Leaving the inn, Marinda set off into the cool, hushed streets of Crown City. Coffee shops were just opening up. Bakeries propped open awnings to unleash aromas that struck Marinda as the very essence of bread. Shabby men pushed wheelbarrows full of produce, while wealthy merchant women paced alongside coldfire-powered carts laden with exotic fruits and vegetables fresh from the docks. A butcher hung out smoked hams and sausages on hooks above his window. Clothiers fluffed up garments on their racks. A hat seller set out the latest fashions, primping and arranging them to catch the eyes of passersby, but when he turned toward Marinda she was surprised to see that his own eyes were milky and sightless; the blind man arranged the hats by feel alone.
This was Crown City, and Marinda realized where she had to go first. After asking directions, she headed to Chronos Square so she could see the Clockwork Angels—and not just because she knew that her father had worked on them.
The city center was a vast open area of flagstones polished by countless feet surrounded by towers and government buildings. On weekends, Chronos Square was also a market that held vendor stalls and street performers, food carts, and flower merchants. The Red Watch stood before the entrance to the square, but they were merely there for show. Their uniforms were impeccably scarlet, like the blood of Captain Pennrose she had seen two nights before…
The Regulators did not challenge Marinda as she passed through the looming stone arch into the mostly deserted square. Workers in red jumpsuits used pushbrooms to clean the clutter and garbage after the previous night’s show.
She looked up at the high Watchtower with its giant clock face, the primary clock of all Albion. She also saw the closed doors at the top from which the Angels would emerge and issue their pronouncements to the crowds below. For those who couldn’t hear the words, the latest statements were printed on small leaflets handed out to each visitor before the show. Some of the discarded sheets lay on the flagstones now, dropped by ecstatic and distracted supplicants. Marinda watched the jumpsuited men and women clean up.
The clock struck seven, and everyone in the square paused, as if holding their breath until the bells had counted out the hour, then they went back to work. Years ago her father had adjusted that timepiece, monitored it, made it perfect. Somewhere behind those high shuttered doors, he had also tinkered with the Clockwork Angels, trying to fix them per the Watchmaker’s instructions, but unable to repair that particular flaw. She wondered if the Watchmaker remembered Arlen Peake after so many years…
She stopped one of the jumpsuited men, who was pushing a bristly broom. “Excuse me, sir. Does the Watchmaker accept visitors? How can I see him?”
The man stared at her. “He doesn’t, and you can’t.”
“But if he’s our loving Watchmaker, doesn’t he want to hear what his citizens have to say?”
“He already knows, ma’am. He already knows.”
Near the tall Watchtower, a golden statue caught her eye, a teenaged boy perfectly rendered with street clothes and an aloof manner; his face looked absolutely real, as if he were a chronograph made out of solid gold. His expression looked either cocky or fearful, depending on the light. No placard identified the statue boy, however.
A jumpsuited woman used a long squeegee and a bucket of paste at the brick walls surrounding the square. She unrolled a colorful poster, slathered the back with paste, and applied it to the wall, aligning the top edge with the perfectly straight mortar lines. Coming for the Solstice Festival! The poster showed an amazing assortment of cheerful clowns, a raven-haired tightrope walker, a dashing swordsman, a well-muscled strongman, an ancient fortune teller, a bearded lady, and a dapper ringmaster with a top hat and handlebar mustache. Magnussen’s Carnival Extravaganza! See—And Be Amazed!
Marinda would likely be in Crown City for at least a week; maybe she would visit the carnival. Such extraordinary people would certainly have extraordinary stories. In the meantime, though, she had many other tales to collect, and many opportunities to do so.
She followed the winding streets that spiraled through the city. Each block of Crown City held as much activity as all of Lugtown, even on a busy day. So many people! Daily lives, lived daily. Marinda tried to imagine where they had come from, their wives and husbands, their children, their pasts…their interests, their joys, their tragedies. Before her father had given her the book, Marinda would never have considered such things. People were just people, each man a mystery to himself, each woman a story kept in a private diary. Now, though, Marinda wondered about them.
In Lugtown, when she had asked her neighbors to give her their tales, their well-confined lives usually comprised no more than a line or two, a paragraph at most. In Crown City, however, surely the people were different, their lives more exciting.
“We go out in the world and take our chances,” she muttered to herself, quoting the Clockwork Angels. She set about stopping people in the street, explaining her mission. She showed them Clockwork Lives, the first pages filled with dark-red words. Many brushed her aside, until she told them that her father had once worked for the Watchmaker himself, then at least some of them agreed.
Alas, when written out in alchemical letters, their life stories were no more engrossing than the inhabitants of sleepy Lugtown. Oh, these were good people and earnest, doing their best, fulfilling their duties, being the most perfect cogs possible in the Watchmaker’s very big machine. They had small dreams, but achievable ones; they satisfied themselves with everyday glory, but they were not heroes or titans by any measure.
At the end of two days, Marinda sat in her acceptable room at her Watchmaker-approved writing desk and read paragraph after paragraph, one tale at a time. Four pages after all that work. That was the methodical, sure solution, but it would take years, half a page at a time, person after person contributing a line or two.
And when Clockwork Lives was finished, such tales would make for ponderous reading indeed. Marinda doubted those were the types of lives her father intended for her to experience. Arlen Peake wanted his daughter to see what she had been missing, not the small measures that kept some people content.
Marinda went about her business, still hoping. On the fourth day, she went to the docks at the mouth of the Winding Pinion River where the lazy waters poured into the sea. The river wound through Albion, bearing barges laden with sacks of wheat, corn, and rice. Another flatboat was crowded with pigs being delivered to the stockyards. Tied to the main docks was an enormous cargo steamer that had plied the expansive ocean from Atlantis, distant places that she had heard of only from her father’s books.
Swarthy carters unloaded crates, barrels, and sacks of exotic minerals extracted from the fabled alchemy mines. Standing on the dock and peering up at the steamer, Marinda saw sailors with exotic features, bronze skin, long dark hair, clothing of a style she had never seen before. When she learned they were from Poseidon City, she knew they must have stories to tell.
The foreign sailors were pleased to take a gold coin in exchange for being pricked with the golden needle for a drop of blood. Reading their tales later, Marinda learned about long and perilous voyages, families left back home, lovers in distant ports, childhoods spent in Poseidon City, friends and enemies. But although the locale was different and the names had an unusual flair, these tales were not the epics she wanted to include. She filled several more pages during that day and the next, and was glad to mark the progress, but she was left feeling unsatisfied.
Marinda continued to explore Crown City. On a side street she found a two-storey museum with a domed roof. Official Orrery—the Universe According to the Watchmaker. She thought that the building seemed a bit small to contain the entire universe, although it might be worth investigating.
Inside the orrery museum, she found a cavernous vault. The walls were covered with numerous posters and star charts. Vitrines contained models of planets and small mounted telescopes. Marinda looked up at the domed ceiling and found a breathtaking contraption mounted above. The stars in the heavens were painted in great detail on the hemispherical dome, points that glowed with alchemical light, while the sun, planets, moons, and minor planets all rode on metal tracks, connected and run by gears, linked by a complex webwork of armatures and pivots.
At the back of the room, three docents wore identical round spectacles, white shirts, gray vests, and black slacks. The men were of varying ages and varying stages of baldness, making them look as if they were the same person taken from different points in his life. Tinkering with a generator and related machinery, the docents looked up as she entered. The youngest of the three hurried over to her. “Welcome to the Universe, madam. Have you come to observe and learn how the heavens work?”
“Does anyone know that? In detail?” Marinda asked.
“The Watchmaker does. Ours is not to understand, but we can observe. And for one mere honeybee coin we can run the machinery for you. You’ll watch the big wheels spin, the planets move along their courses.”
The middle-aged docent came up. “It’s well worth the price of admission.”
From the opposite side of the vault, she heard a faint cough. For the first time she noticed a motionless man huddling in a wheelchair, a blanket over his bony knees. The ancient man was sculpted from the same model as the other docents, but he was much older. Gnarled hands grasped the arms of the chair, and thick spectacles poised on his hawkish nose. He wrinkled his forehead and stared longingly at the orrery contraption as if his prayers could make it move.
Curious to see the clockwork universe in action, Marinda handed one of her coins to the youngest docent. After his two companions closed and restarted the engine, he inserted it into a slot in the machine. The coldfire power source brightened, and dials on the machinery glowed as the artificial heavens awakened. After a straining hum, the wheels began to turn overhead with a clack and a clatter of spinning gears and oscillating armatures.
“The stars and the planets take years, even centuries, to move along their courses,” explained the oldest docent. “But we have the ability to make time whirl ahead. Observe.” He turned a knob on the generator, and the orrery thrummed and rattled, picking up speed.
The moving planets entered epicycles and then returned to their main orbits. Marinda found it captivating, and she watched the heavenly bodies continue through several orbits until the coldfire dimmed, the generator ran down, and the orrery froze back into place.
The three docents also watched the contraption, but they had seen the universe many times before. Marinda heard another cough and remembered the ancient man in his wheelchair. She saw him staring at the orrery, slowly shaking his head.
Marinda turned to the young docent. “Who is that man?”
“He’s always here—an old astronomer, paralyzed and unable to speak.”
The middle-aged docent added, “We’ve been told that he’s the original builder of this orrery, but he never talks to anyone, just stares at the mechanism. I can’t say why.”
The oldest docent said, “We tolerate his presence, but no one knows his story.”
That caught Marinda’s interest. She walked over to the ancient man, who continued to shake his head, staring through thick glasses at the astronomical display. She bent close and extended her leatherbound book. “I would like your tale, sir. I want to know what you’ve done and what’s inside your mind.” She opened to the next blank page after so many pages filled with small stories. Not knowing whether he could hear her, she explained about her book, the alchemically treated pages, the lives she had collected so far. “You must have a story to tell.”
The ancient man blinked, and a tear leaked out the corner of an eye, trickling through the path of least resistance down his wrinkled cheek. A perfect transparent droplet. Marinda wondered what the alchemy would do if the old man presented a tear instead of a drop of blood. Perhaps the words of his life’s tale would be written in invisible ink…
The ancient astronomer’s eyes shifted from the artificial stars, the intricate clockwork contraption in the dome of the astronomy museum, and then he looked directly at her. Part of his face twitched while the rest remained motionless, like flesh-colored clay. But his hand twitched, then slowly lifted from the arm of the chair, extending a forefinger toward her.
Taking that as permission, Marinda took out her golden needle, pricked his fingertip, then squeezed a drop of blood onto the blank paper.
The alchemy reacted, and the words of his life spread out like a meteor shower on the page.