CHAPTER 5
Marinda stared at the flowing words that were distilled out of her father’s blood, Arlen Peake’s mysterious early years wrung out of the alchemically treated pages. She had lived with the man all her life, had remained with him in the lonely years after her mother ran away; she had read him stories as he grew more infirm, kept him company, tended him, but she had never imagined the secret tale he kept inside.
Marinda found it bittersweet, yet gladdening, that her father had burdened her with some of the answers and a foolhardy quest she had never wanted. Unlike her father, though, she valued contentment over adventure, stability over recklessness. Well, there was nothing for it but to do the task he had set her. The sooner she filled this book with its life stories, the sooner she could be back to her normal schedule. Yes, that was what she would do—if it meant so much to her father. Best to get on with it.
She closed the tome and rose from the graveside, brushing grass off her skirt. Her knees were stiff from sitting so long in such an awkward position. In deepening twilight she hurried back to her cottage. She wished she had brought a coldfire lantern, but she hadn’t expected to sit so long in the cemetery reading. In fact, she hadn’t expected the book of Clockwork Lives to function at all. Even though the book’s magic had edited out all of the tangential information, her father’s tale had been quite a long and—yes, she admitted—engrossing story.
Back home, where she was all too alone despite the company of the three clockwork Regulators, her mind was filled with thoughts that had not yet crystallized into definite plans. Though Lugtown had not changed, and likely never would, her own future was in turmoil. It reminded her of the anarchy Albion had endured for so long before the arrival of the Watchmaker.
That night, by the light of a coldfire lamp, Marinda read the story again, aloud, to Zivo, Woody, and Lee. It reminded her of when she would read to her father. The clockwork Regulators stood at attention in their bright uniforms, listening to her every word, although their painted-on expressions never changed. Their only response was an occasional hiss of venting steam from the valve flaps in their copperpot heads.
When she finished the tale, she found herself wondering about all those other aspects of Arlen Peake’s life that he had chosen not to chronicle, particularly his love for her mother and what had gone wrong, why Elitia Peake had found him lacking as a husband and, presumably, Marinda lacking as a daughter. Or maybe Elitia had found her own life lacking, and the hurt she had done to her family was simply collateral damage. Marinda didn’t know, wasn’t even sure she wanted to read that story.
But her father’s tale filled only ten of the blank pages in her thick volume. She had a lot of work to do, so she went to bed for a good rest, determined to get an early start the following day. She would have only four days to have the book completely filled before she’d be evicted, and she did not want that inconvenience.
She wondered what other interesting and unexpected revelations she might receive from the townspeople she had known all her life.
Next morning, she got dressed while a happily whirring Woody used the clockwork pump outside to fill their spare teakettle, since the other one had been damaged on the morning of her father’s death. She chose the clothes she usually wore for her regular Wednesday trip into town, even though this was only Sunday. Her schedule had been knocked completely off the rails. Letting Zivo, Woody, and Lee tend to the routine household business, she tucked the alchemical book under one arm and set off.
Even though she had a lot of lives to collect in the next few days, Marinda was confident that if she simply set about the task in a methodical and diligent way, she could fill the book. Now that she knew what was expected of her, she formulated a plan.
First, she went to the solicitor’s office to claim her stipend. As she arrived at Frull’s office precisely on time, Marinda looked at Lugtown’s public clocks, all of which were said to be accurate to within a minute. With her father’s poor health and failing eyesight, Arlen Peake had been in no position to maintain the local clocks. She wondered who fulfilled that function now.
Benjulian Frull sat at his desk waiting for her, and Marinda was all business. She opened the Clockwork Lives volume for the solicitor to see. “I admit I was skeptical, but this book works exactly as my father said it would.”
Frull looked down at the crimson letters that wrote out Arlen Peake’s story. “Your father was a man of many surprises.” He ran his fingertips along the writing. “I’m sure it’s a fascinating story.”
Marinda took the book back from him before he could read the tale, which she wanted to keep private, at least for now. “I’ve decided to get started on the work he set me to do. I believe you have a stipend for me? No doubt I will encounter some unforeseen expenses before I am finished.”
She would ask many people for their stories, but she might have to pay some of them to fill a few more pages of her volume. And if she couldn’t finish before Wednesday, when the eviction order took force, she might have to pay for temporary lodgings just to wrap up the last few pages in the book.
The solicitor unlocked an embedded safe from which he withdrew a stack of gold honeybee coins. He counted them out carefully. “That should last you for some time, Miss Peake, provided you are frugal.”
“I am quite familiar with frugality.” She tucked away the money, then slid the tome across the solicitor’s desk, turning to the blank page after her father’s story. She withdrew the golden needle from its place in the binding. “Mr. Frull, I would like to add your story to Clockwork Lives.”
Frull was surprised, then he chuckled. “Of course, although I don’t know why you would be interested in my simple story.”
She waited for him to present his fingertip. “I am not interested in collecting anyone’s story, yet that is what I have been tasked to do, so I will do my job. Good work always leads to good fortune.”
He let her prick his skin with the sharp needle, then milked his fingertip until a blood drop formed and dropped onto the blank page. The red splash spread out into furiously scrawled words written in perfect alchemical penmanship. The solicitor watched the process with fascination.
His blood wrote one paragraph, then another, and finally a brief third paragraph before stopping. The words didn’t even fill an entire page. One drop of her father’s blood had been enough to cover ten complete pages of his life story, even condensed and edited.
Benjulian Frull’s life generated only a few paragraphs?
“Maybe it needs another drop of blood,” Marinda said.
But when the solicitor scanned the lines in the alchemical book, he smiled. “Quite an extraordinarily concise and efficient summary of my life, without the flowery convolutions of legal language.”
Marinda read the paragraphs and found that Frull’s whole tale could indeed be summarized in those few words; the story was complete, as written. The alchemically treated pages filtered out the dull parts and polished the man’s life down to its essence.
Frull had grown up in Lugtown, studied his law books, took the standardized test issued by the Watchmaker’s Ministry of Solicitors, and after he was accepted, he set up his offices, worked his cases, and did what was expected of him. End of story.
The solicitor read it again with a broadening smile. “Yes, that is quite good. Everything in a nutshell.”
Disappointed, Marinda closed the book and retrieved the golden needle. She looked at the time—10:00 a.m.—and decided to get moving. She had an entire book of lives to fill, and that was going to be difficult if each person’s life comprised only half a page.
She walked down the town streets, looked at the shops and offices. Everyone went about their business just like every other day. The old apothecary peeped out of his shop, expressed his sympathy to her, and thanked Marinda for her business over the years.
She paused to explain about the alchemical book, and out of respect for her father, the gaunt old man agreed to give Marinda what she wanted. A pinprick, another splash of blood…and the words scrolled out, sentence after sentence.
The apothecary’s tale described how he had always hoped to be an alchemist, dreaming of a scholarship to the Alchemy College in Crown City, but found that he had more of an aptitude for medicinals. He studied botany, pored over books on natural science. He experimented with medicinal plants, identified formulations and concoctions after annotating countless home remedies and local treatments. He submitted some of his best discoveries to the Apothecary Board, hoping they would become standardized treatments.
But because the man used himself as an experimental subject, testing countless herbal treatments, medicinal substances, and even marginal poisons, his life story was told in disjointed, fragmented sentences. Sometimes they ran on; sometimes they stopped abruptly without reaching a point. The apothecary’s tale filled the rest of the page beneath Benjulian Frull’s life and ran onto a second page before petering out.
Another story down, another page filled—but it was one more hour gone and she still had hundreds of pages left to go, in only a few days.
Marinda began to feel disappointed and frustrated. She walked past the general store, where she saw the three rambunctious redheaded boys playing out front. The grocer took fresh apples out of a crate shipped from Barrel Arbor. He waved at her, then polished one of the apples on his sleeve before stacking it on the display.
She could ask Camberon for a drop of blood. His story might fill pages…but she felt reluctant to do so. She didn’t really want to know about his happy life.
Once the alchemical magic distilled his biography, she wondered whether she would even merit a mention in it, if their betrothal and possible life together had even made an impact on him…or if all of their hopes and dreams together would be an extraneous storyline that the alchemy would edit out for improved focus and pacing.
Marinda decided there were other tales she would rather have in the book.
She went to the agate quarry in search of other volunteers. She found an ancient, bent man sitting outside on a bench staring toward the rock terraces. The crews worked like termites in stone, digging out thunder eggs and also quarrying mundane stone to be used for construction purposes. The very old stonecutter had retired, but he still sat and watched, listening to the musical clink of rock hammers as they carved away the stone.
Marinda stepped up to his bench and offered him one of the gold honeybee coins. “I would like a drop of your blood,” she said, “for your life’s story.”
The old man perked up and took notice, as if he had cracked open an average-looking thunder egg and found a pulsing rock pearl. He didn’t understand her request, but he understood the coin, and he slowly unfolded arthritic hands that were damaged from years of gripping a hammer and striking hard rocks. The calluses on his fingertips were so thick she had to prick him twice with the golden needle before a tiny droplet spilled out.
Despite his long life, the old quarry worker’s story filled just three lines on the page: “Grew up at the quarry, worked in the quarry, got married, had a son who works in the quarry. Found a very large thunder egg once, beautiful agate which I polished and then sent off to Crown City, but never heard anything back from the Watchmaker. I worked in the quarry some more, but now I’m too old, so I rest and I watch.” His story ended there.
Marinda read it with disappointment. “That’s all?”
“What more is there?”
A middle-aged stoneworker came down the gravel path to join them, and Marinda realized this was the old man’s son, who was curious to see her there. The retired stoneworker held up the golden coin. “It’s Marinda Peake—just as odd as her father. She’ll pay you a gold coin if you let her prick your finger.”
“I could use a gold coin.” The worker extended his finger without hesitation, so Marinda took the proffered sample. His droplet spelled out a biography even more curt than the old man’s: “My father taught me to work in the quarries. Our family has an affinity for thunder eggs. We find them better than others do. I work in the quarry like he did, and now my own son is trained to crack thunder eggs.”
Marinda blinked at the story, surprised that this man, and his father, had nothing more to tell.
“Hey Gero! Come here.” The father shouted to a group of children who huddled over piles of round stone cannonballs extracted from the shafts. The children wielded small hammers and had grown quite proficient in cracking open the agates. One of the boys, who looked remarkably like the middle-aged man, jumped to his feet and scrambled up the rock steps to join them. “Hold out your finger, boy. You’ll get a gold coin for it.”
“What do I have to do?”
Marinda cautioned, “I’m not certain that it’s worth—”
But the father encouraged the boy. So as not to go back on an implied promise, Marinda handed young Gero a honeybee coin, then pricked his finger with the needle, startling him. He yanked his finger away, but Marinda caught his hand before he could suck on the droplet. “I need that.” She squeezed the blood onto the paper, and the boy’s indignation of having been pricked vanished as he watched the magic words scrawl across the paper.
“I want to be just like my father.”
That was all.
By the end of the day, Marinda was discouraged. She had gathered eight more lives from Lugtown, but filled only three more pages. She looked at the book in her hands as if it had betrayed her. “At this rate, I’ll run out of stipend money long before I fill the book,” she muttered. It didn’t seem possible that all these people in Lugtown, combined, had lived half as many pages as the abridged, condensed life of Arlen Peake.
At sunset on the second day, she passed by the solicitor’s office as he was closing up for the evening, and she confronted him with the alchemical book. “Mr. Frull, there seems to be a flaw in the plan!”
He clucked his tongue. “Oh, I doubt that, Miss Peake. A properly executed plan can have no flaws.”
She showed him the few pages cluttered with brief, uninteresting lives, and he drew his brows together. “Hmm, I’m not surprised. You already know these people, and you know this life. Perhaps you need to look elsewhere to find the epic lives you seek? I believe that may have been Arlen’s intent.”
Marinda had been thinking the same thing, but not yet willing to consider it. She might have to leave her familiar surroundings. No doubt, her father intended to nudge her out of the nest, to make her go beyond her comfortable boundaries of a sleepy little town.
“Very well. The steamliner comes on Wednesday, and that’s when I have to be out of the cottage anyway. I will purchase a ticket to Crown City, where in short order I’ll be able to find far more stories than I require.” Under such uncertain circumstances, that did seem the most efficient solution. “I’ll be back before you know it.”
He fiddled with his lock and key. “I am sure you will be. In the meantime, after you leave your cottage, I will make sure all of the items remain safe and preserved, ready for you to claim them.” He tipped his hat. “Good evening, Miss Peake.”
The solicitor walked away, brisk and content, for he had his own quiet, perfect life to go back to.