Deep magic second coll.., p.45
Deep Magic - Second Collection, page 45
part #2 of Deep Magic Collection Series
The lapis clock flew off the shelf and crashed to the floor at Corbeph’s feet. Corbeph squeezed her eyes shut and flexed her aching fingers. She did not bend to retrieve the fallen clock until voices outside the door shook her from her reverie.
The people in the street were only bound for the glassblower’s shop next door, but Corbeph hurried to secret the clock away anyway, and dropped it into the bottom drawer of Marinauld’s—of her own workbench with a clang. A great crack had opened in the lapis on the back of the coffin, and the clock was as silent as the empty sky.
* * *
The clock at city center was tolling Fifth while Corbeph worked frantically to fix the lapis clock in advance of her mother’s visit. She unbent the brass mount where the pendulum attached, realigned the bristling teeth of the escapement with the impulse pallet, replaced the bruised face. It was finished only just in time, with Marinauld knocking at the door by the time Corbeph hid the repair and broken parts in her desk. But the clock kept time as well as it ever had, and with its back flat against the wall behind it, the jagged crack was invisible.
She offered Marinauld a cup of tea and a seat by the fire. She did all she could to make Marinauld feel at home: an impossible task, to be sure. A once-and-no-longer home might be the least welcoming place in the world, as far as Corbeph could imagine. In any case, Marinauld’s questions were only for the state of the shop. Yes, she promised her mother, business was fine, her commissions were finished on time, she saw to it that she was paid on time too.
Sydive’s arrival provided relief from questioning, but tension all its own. After her elder daughter joined them in the house, Marinauld studiously avoided all timekeeping talk. Corbeph wished one of them would raise the subject somehow: gossiping about the shockingly young master who had been hired to make repairs to the all-important town center clock perhaps, or the upcoming election of this term’s master council. To lance the boil once and have it done with. But Corbeph couldn’t bring herself to raise the subject any more than her mother or sister could.
After Sydive had gone home and Marinauld had been safely shuffled off to visit her friends in the city, Corbeph took out the repair kit she’d hastily stashed in her desk before her mother’s arrival. It wasn’t as tidily organized as it had been in Marinauld’s day: now scrap pieces of metal and odd springs littered the bottom of the canvas squares. Artifacts of clocks living and dead.
Corbeph knew she ought to clean it out and sort everything into its proper place. She settled down at the workbench and upended the whole mess onto its surface: screws and wires and clock hands every which way. She sighed and started to pick through the jumble.
A funny thing: the two sides of this particular metal scrap, from which she’d cut a simple tapered hand, looked almost like the shape of an airship’s wing in miniature. A proper airship wing was curved from top to bottom as well as in silhouette, of course ... but perhaps Corbeph could contrive to bend the metal with the assistance of a pair of tongs?
And she could. Metal filings flew as she tended to edges, added screw holes, and fastened pieces together. The hollow arm of a brass pendulum served as fuselage, and with a bent gear and three spare second hands, Corbeph fashioned a propeller. And when she set the device down on the desk, with the moon high up in the sky, and turned the key to wind it, the tiny propeller spun, and the wings canted up and down.
A waste of spares, even of scraps. They might have served some practical use. She ought to take it apart or throw it away before her mother returned and spotted it.
But instead, she found herself clearing a shelf of desk clocks, which squeezed in ably enough on the mantel alongside the lapis timepiece. In their place, she settled the miniature airship, all alone in the empty, dusty space. Marinauld could hardly miss it on her way in the door, Corbeph thought, and hung up her apron on its iron hook as she left the shop.
* * *
From the mantel, the clock announced Seventh, and Corbeph helped Dako Petrain heft his great clock in its case of red wood and maneuver through the open door to the back of his waiting truck. “Thank you, Ayle Corbeph,” he said, and she bobbed her head in answer. The years she’d poured into first her apprenticeship and now her mastery had sown gray hairs in among the dark on her head, but it had never lit the same fire of passion in her that it had in her mother or her sister. Corbeph was a fair clockmaker and a fine purveyor of repairs, but her commissions never came from the earl up in Tyquian or the Cayland princesses over on the mainlands of the Twenty Nations, whose fortunes had been freed up with the signing of the ceasefire. As long as she did not lose the mastershop, she would consider herself successful enough. No use in measuring herself by her mother’s meter.
But still Petrain hesitated. “I wonder,” he said, a flush of color in his cheeks. “I know it is terribly rude of me to speak to you so directly about financial matters.” Was he trying to haggle over the cost of his repairs? Corbeph felt a red flush of anger rise to her own face. “And normally I would never be so rude as to raise the subject. But you see, your shelf of curios has no prices marked ...”
Curios? Corbeph realized he meant the shelf of little knickknacks she’d devised to join the miniature airship’s company. Delicate little dancers, dragons, and devils, a clever owl with eyes that blinked and stared. “Oh,” she said, and swallowed her anger. “Oh, they’re not—”
“I know they’re not marked yet: Sydive said you’d only just set up to sell them.” Petrain smiled, though his forehead wrinkled up toward his graying hair. “But she thought if I asked, you might forgive me the small social error of talking finances. And the clockwork butterfly would so delight my youngest daughter for her decade birthday next month!”
Sydive said. Corbeph eyed Petrain for another moment, then thought about the rent check she’d been holding off sending until his repair work was finished. “Come back inside with me,” she said. “Let us set aside social niceties and discuss what we would both find fair.”
* * *
The mantel clock had just finished striking Third when someone scratched at the door of the mastershop. Corbeph said, without looking up, “We open at Third and a half.”
“Oh, do open up, Cor, for all gods’ sake,” said the glass-muffled voice, and Corbeph looked up at the face that peered through the painted window. It took a moment for her eyes to focus on her sister’s face, and then despite the advance warning from Old Blue, the cacophony of chimes when the rest of the clocks struck the hour made her leap in her seat.
When had Sydive last visited the clock shop? Corbeph couldn’t remember the last time Sydive had been here without a visit from Ayle Marinauld to bring her. She hurried over to let Sydive in, and said, “I hear you’ve been matchmaking for me.”
Sydive gave her a half smile as she stepped inside. Her first child blossomed inside her, broadening her belly and her feet alike. The child must come soon now, or else Corbeph feared her sister would burst like an overripe fruit. “Mother doesn’t approve of your latest hobby, you know.” She walked over to the shelf of miniatures: mostly empty now but for the airship and a few stray companions. “Or should I say, your side business?”
“The masters aren’t going to revoke my mark, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Probably not, at least. The council had called her up, as they’d felt that the amount of time Corbeph now devoted to pursuits other than proper clockmaking would be to the detriment of her mastery. Of course, building her miniatures did nothing but hone her skills as a clockmaster. But they still required her to come in every year now to reearn her master’s mark, rather than every half decade like anyone else. They didn’t really think she would lose her skills, she was sure, but rather that this new diversion would cheapen the high name of clockmastery. “And Mother can’t revoke the shop either. It’s mine now.”
She felt churlish even as she said it, but Sydive didn’t react. She fingered the outline of the airship with her good hand. Corbeph’s eyes flicked to the medallion on her rolled coat sleeve, then darted away again. “I’m not worried about your mark,” Sydive said. Her smile faded. “Though Mother probably is.”
“Why are you here, then?” Corbeph sounded off-kilter even to her own ears. There was no reason for Sydive’s presence in the shop to stir her up so. “What—what do you want?”
Sydive was silent, studying the figures on the curio shelf. The airship, yes, and a little fire dancer, a rabbit that hopped and a scurrying spider. “Lots of things,” she said finally. “Some I can have, and some I won’t. The question is, what do you want, Corbeph?”
And they stood, sister to sister, in the pink light of the early-morning sun, with motes of dust dancing between them.
* * *
The curio shelf had not grown any fuller four years later, when the mantel clock struck half past Seventh to let Corbeph know it was time to turn out the lights and shutter the shop for the night. The shelf’s census, however, had changed quite a bit in that time: zoos of animals, gardens of flowers, and of course entire battalions of miniature airships had come and gone.
The clock shelves, in contrast, were more or less full, which was just as well. No one wanted to come peruse a tinkerer’s work and find her shop still and silent. She made a circuit of the walls, winding, dusting, straightening. She had just finished rearranging the curio shelf to best display her handiwork when a knock came at the shuttered door.
Her back cracked when she pulled herself up to her full height. “I’m closed for the evening,” she called to the white-haired gentleman on the other side of the door.
“Yes, I see that,” he said. He carried a silver-handled cane, upon which he rested both hands. “I came by late specifically in the interest of catching you alone. Do you have a moment?”
She unlocked the door and let him into the shop. Silver on his cane and fox-fur trim on his short-waisted, long-tailed coat: this was a gentleman of some standing in the city, and even with the new channels she had carved with her business, she couldn’t afford to have a bad reputation poured down on her from the heights of the city. “Thank you for your interest,” she said, and gestured to the curio shelf. “As you can see, the choices are slim at the moment, but I have a few slots left for commissions before the holiday rush.”
“Ah,” said the gentleman, and settled onto the stool at Corbeph’s workbench. She tried not to bristle, and nearly succeeded. “Yes, I did wish to speak to you about a commission.” He touched the half-assembled sourceship on Corbeph’s tabletop with two fingertips; his cream-colored gloves came away with a spot of grease. “But not, I think, one that will fit on your shelf. I had in mind something slightly—grander.”
He glanced at the clock on the mantel: forty minutes past the hour, Corbeph noted. “What is it, then, that I can help you with?” she pressed, with a care to mind her tone. The gentlefolk did not like to feel themselves hurried along while shopping, however late the clockmaster’s supper might be.
He broke his gaze from the lapis clock and smiled at her. “I’m sorry to be so obscure, but I assure you, it’s entirely unintentional. You see, I simply haven’t the words to explain to you what it is I’m seeking.” He extended his hand. “Let me begin again, with a proper introduction. My name is Calix Aidive.”
She shook his hand, her hand small and suddenly damp in his cool white grasp. Calix Aidive, the Minister for Aeronautics. “Sir,” she said, all worries about the time wiped away. A quiet blanket of peace had lain over the Hemisphere for half a decade now—what could he desire of her? “How can I serve Aeronautics today?”
“You cannot,” he said, and her mouth parted around an unformed question. “That is to say, I am here on behalf of a newly created ministry, which we have decided to call Selenonautics.” Selenonautics—travel not through the air, but to the Moons? Corbeph’s heart skipped a beat. Whatever he read in her face made Calix Aidive smile. “Tell me, Ayle Corbeph: the fine work you do in miniature ... could you scale that up to true life size?”
She thought she could, and so she assured him that she would. For the next hour, they scrawled drawings and plans, building selenoships in the air between them: clockwork doors that could seal against airless space, clockwork wings and fins that would unfold at the proper time, clockwork legs to deploy upon the fine pink faces of the moons. Moons that would see Camdiran flags unfurled upon them, not Javene. By the time they agreed to part for the evening and return to the work on the morrow, it was fully fifteen minutes to Tenth, and Corbeph had not a thought for either her supper table or her bed.
“It is a pleasure to work with you, Ayle Corbeph,” said the minister, and paused with one hand on the door and one on his cane. He lifted the cane’s tip and pointed it toward the mantel. “Do you know,” he said, “it gives me great cheer to see that old thing again. Beautiful work. I am only sorry I had to return it to your mother, at the end of things. I am pleased to see that it turned out so well. And that you did too.” And he placed his cap upon his head, and bid the clockmaster a good evening, though evening was hours past.
* * *
Ayle Marinauld did not come to the launch, and Corbeph did not trouble her for the reasons why. It was enough to stand beside Sydive, and her sister’s young son and daughter, in the great laughing crowd that had gathered on the mountainside to attend the historic day: Camdirans for the most part, yes, but Corbeph picked out many of the Quartisphere’s other dozens of languages mixed into the buzz.
And Sydive’s children were as keen as any for the day’s events. They carefully explained to Corbeph in their high clear voices the things they had learned at crèche: how the rockets burned, how the selenoship would orbit first one moon, and then the other. Things Corbeph already knew, of course, but she nodded sagely with each word. Sydive had chosen fine fathers for them, bright eager little things that they were. Corbeph wondered, sometimes, what had become of the third child that Sydive had borne, that had gone to live with its father’s family; if she would ever encounter a youth on the street and recognize in a smile or a stare a certain familiarity. She wondered, too, if Sydive had the same thoughts. But for now, the faces of her small family were painted with solemn joy as they watched the flower of fire bloom beneath the chrome curve of the selenoship’s belly. From its great distance, the selenoship seemed to move so slowly as it parted from the ground—but Corbeph knew it was moving faster than any airship ever devised. And it would certainly fly farther too.
“You never got to fly,” said Sydive, over the distant roar of burning fuel. Corbeph looked at her askance. The children between them paid no mind; their gaping mouths and wide eyes drank down the sight of the selenoship with no thought of coming up for air. “I’m sorry for that.”
“You have nothing to apologize for,” Corbeph said when she could. She had no words to offer Sydive for her losses in turn. She felt she should have, but nothing came. It was all right: Sydive had already turned her face skyward, and Corbeph followed her gaze a moment later. No, she had never flown. But her handiwork had, and she thought that that should be enough.
By the time the rockets faded to a pinprick of fire in the sky, Corbeph’s neck ached from craning it for so long. She and Sydive and the children boarded the citybound train; her niece and nephew fell asleep, one weary head in each woman’s lap, before they’d left the station. Corbeph hired a hackney cab to take Sydive and her family home but decided to walk back to the shop herself—it wasn’t nearly so far to go as Sydive’s little standalone house in the suburbs.
The lapis clock on the mantel tolled Tenth to close the long day out just as Corbeph opened the door, and she smiled. With both hands she reached out and drew the old clock out away from the wall and turned it to catch the soft light of the glow lamps in the street. From the right angle, you could see the dark crack in the coffin. She left it there and wondered if Ayle Marinauld would ever be back in the shop to see it.
“You still keep good time,” she told the timepiece. The clock did not, could not, answer, of course. Corbeph stayed there, her weathered face close to its flat impassive one, until ten past Tenth rolled around. Then she locked the shop door and took herself to bed.
ABOUT AIMEE OGDEN
Aimee Ogden lives in Wisconsin with her husband, three-year-old twins, and very old dog. A former software tester and science teacher, she now writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses.
Website: aimeeogdenwrites.wordpress.com
Twitter: @Aimee_Ogden
POISON MAIDEN, OPEN SKIES
By Laurie Tom | 6,200 Words
THE WAGON COMES to halt and tips forward as the pulling soldiers set the shafts down. It is so cramped inside that I’m able to brace myself against the walls and my seat to keep from falling over.
Hell is raining ahead of us. Our artillery pounds the German trenches, but the window before me is so tiny that the only thing I see is the dark of night with the occasional flash from the falling mortars.
Metal scrapes against metal and my enclosure shudders as the soldiers unbar the wagon. One of them raps lightly on the door; the signal that they’re leaving. Two minutes.
I count out the seconds for the soldiers to get clear, knowing that Beth, Charlotte, and the rest of the Harpies are doing the same. When I reach zero I push against the door. The airtight seal breaks with a pop I can feel more than I can hear. The artillery is louder outside.
Our escort has fled, leaving us in the middle of no man’s land. No one ever wants to be near Harpy Squad once we’re out.
