Shadow of the War Machine (The Secret Order) (17 page)

I followed the butler with my flickering lamp. It was strangely unsettling inside the house. Everything looked as it should have, but there was a very lifeless air in the halls. Like walking through a house populated by nothing but ghosts. It didn’t help that I was following an automaton, who by his very nature was neither living nor dead.

I stifled a cough against the fine dust that hung in the air.
My wounded arm throbbed and ached, but I held the lamp fast. Papa had been right to hide here. No one in their right mind would come to this place, and with the house perched on the top of the hill, he would have been able to see anyone approaching the mansion. Between the view and those wolves, no one could enter the house without being noticed.

But if this place made the perfect fortress, why would he have left?

The butler moved through the darkness without much mind to it, since he didn’t have eyes. The creaking and clanking of his stiffening joints rattled down the empty halls.

The mansion was enormous, and must have been a glory in its prime. Though the house itself was baroque, I didn’t find the décor overbearing or gaudy in the way so many of the palaces of Europe tended to be. I never much cared for overly ornamental papers on the walls, or colorful porcelain tiles. Instead the walls had been painted a pale color I couldn’t see so well in the terribly dim light, but the lower halves of the walls were delineated by elegant wainscoting that had been painted white.

We entered a smoking room before we crossed a corridor and found ourselves at a large set of double doors toward the back of the mansion.

The doors opened silently as the automaton approached, without the mechanical man ever reaching out to touch them. It was like magic, even though it seemed such a simple thing.

I felt as if the gates of heaven had parted before me. A golden light flooded into the hall. We passed through the doors into a gilded conservatory. The glass ceiling glowed with light from hanging lamps that drenched us in warmth.

I looked around and gasped. Delicate trees and flowers bloomed in profusion within the protection of the glass walls and ceiling. Heavy fruit hung from the branches and vines, and vegetables spilled out from containers and raised beds. The arrangement of them managed to be both productive and decorative at once.

Onions, tomatoes, potatoes, grapes, oranges, lemons—suddenly I felt starved, like Tantalus beneath the trees. A tendril of hair clung to my cheek in the humidity. I brushed it back as a fat chicken ran across the path and a goat bleated from somewhere in the corner.

A trio of enormous butterflies, easily the size of dinner plates, stretched their wings on a bush bearing exotic peppers. But no, they were machines. I looked more closely at the foliage and realized there was movement everywhere.

A mechanical peacock groomed his golden feathers,
then spread his tail. Patina on the copper gave it a blue-green sheen, and yet the ornamental swirls set in his rattling feathers shimmered with bright brass.

A monkey hung from a tree to my left, his jointed tail curled around a fat branch of an orange tree. He swung there, looking at me with lifeless black marble eyes.

An entire menagerie preened and strutted, moving through the protected garden and shining in the false sunlight, all clockwork, all beautiful, and yet nothing here could give me any answers as to what had happened to my grandfather.

I heard a growl, and I froze.

Beneath a bush a clockwork tiger bared his sharp fangs.

My heart stopped and I couldn’t breathe. The wolf ’s teeth had been sharp and cutting; the tiger’s teeth were three times the size.

He blinked his orb-like eyes, then prowled forward, keeping his head low.

I ran to catch up to the butler, desperate to leave the conservatory. Every fiber in my being urged me to flee as another set of doors opened, dragging across the rug on the other side. I slipped past the automaton into the hall and the doors closed again.

I found myself at the bottom of a twisting staircase. The butler began the ascent, and I darted ahead of him. There were no other passages, no doors. The stair led relentlessly upward until I finally reached a large arched door.

I passed through the doorway, unprepared for the sight before me.

Cold air washed over me as I looked up. The dome of the house split, opening to the clear dark winter sky shimmering with a million stars. A telescope easily the size of my toy shop tilted toward the deep night. As it moved, gears ranging in size from monstrous to tiny danced in a finely tuned ballet.

The entire structure was surrounded by rings the size of the room itself. Each ring held a model of one of the planets, and they spun and swirled around the central telescope, like a model of the cosmos taken to scale.

My Lord, I didn’t have words. The heavens were there before me.

A very old man sat, reclined and motionless in a strange gear-laden chair beneath the telescope. He stared into the machine, peering into the depths of whatever lay beyond the stars.

I hesitated. I shouldn’t have even been in the house. What should I say to him? “Sorry to disturb you, monsieur”?
Somehow that seemed like an uncomfortable introduction to someone I had never met, when I had intruded on his person without invitation.

What if he wished to call the constable? He’d have every right.

I took a deep breath and calmed my panic. Technically I was family, and Durant hadn’t had any visitors in a very long time. All the same, I hoped Will had discovered a way to escape.

“Maurice Durant?” I said, as gently as I could so that I wouldn’t startle or disturb him. “Monsieur?”

He didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to do. I took a tentative step forward, then another.

“Monsieur Durant?” I called again.

“What do you want?” he shouted in a voice that crackled and wheezed with age. “Can’t you see I’m busy? Always bothering,” he muttered.

This situation was the height of impropriety, and John Frank had already warned me that Durant’s mind was half-gone. “Monsieur Durant, I beg your pardon for our intrusion, but I am searching for Henry Whitlock.” He moved his chair, and the large gears and wheels above me turned, swinging the various planets in a coordinated dance around
the main telescope. I took a step back, then ducked as the model of Mercury swooped overhead. “I am his granddaughter, Margaret.”

Maurice Durant pulled back from his gazing, and the chair righted itself until it seemed like a throne set at the center of a shifting universe. He looked down at me. His eyes were rheumy and clouded with age, but I could have sworn there was something in them, some spark of a genius that used to be.

“Henri is not here, and so I have no use for his granddaughter. Be gone,” he said, even as his gaze drifted back toward his telescope.

“Please, monsieur. I need to know where he went if he left of his own accord, or if he was taken from this place.” I wouldn’t leave, not without answers.

Durant’s chair swung back around and lowered him beneath his telescope. “Thirty-seven degrees. Mark on the twenty-sixth of December at nine forty . . . seven.”

“Please, monsieur!” I shouted.

Durant’s chair made a grinding sound as he tilted it to look at me once more. “You’re still here?”

I lifted my chin as I stared up at him. “I will not leave until you tell me what I need to know.”

“Where is Henri?” Durant said with a frown. “He said he would be gone three days, but it is now two years, six weeks, eight hours—” He peered at a pocket watch.

“Monsieur, if you will. The time is not important to me,” I said.

His weathered face turned red. “Not important!”

“All I wish to know is what drove him from this place.” I fisted my hands at my sides.

Durant made a chewing motion, as if playing with the spaces where his teeth had once been. “Henri was chasing ghosts. No good will come of it,” he muttered under his breath.

I stood straight and stared the old codger down. “Do you know where he went when he left here?”

Durant acted as if he hadn’t heard my question. I didn’t move from my spot, though I had to duck Mercury a second time. Durant gave me a sour look.

“He went looking for a truth that should have remained dark.” Durant turned a large wheel next to him, and the entire mechanism shifted, lifting the telescope to a steeper pitch, and he peered back into it. “There are dark places, you know. A spiraling vortex that sweeps all light into it.”

I didn’t know what the old man was talking about. He
had lost all sense. Now I knew what John Frank had meant by his not being able to hold a conversation.

“Old flames burn the hottest,” he continued as he stared at his precious stars. “Yet even that light cannot escape. It’s the deadly spiral. It drew him in.”

I climbed higher on the contraption in spite of the pain in my arm. “Get down from there. You’ll damage the balance,” he said.

“Do you know where Henry is now?” I asked again. If I had to ask it a thousand times, I would. Durant seemed to surmise this as he glared at me.

“He took a train.” Durant turned the wheel again, then pulled a lever. “Vile contraptions. We never should have let some of their development leak to the masses. Now the rails are everywhere. The countryside gone. Locomotives belching smoke and blowing whistles. No more stars. Filthy skies.”

I did my best to hold my patience.

“What city?” I asked.

Durant didn’t bother to look at me. Instead he continued to stare into his telescope. “I never much cared for cities. Too many people. Too much light. Paris, bah. How could it compare to this?” Durant waved above him.

Paris.

“He went to Paris?”

“Get out of my house. You bother me.” Durant glared down from his nest at the heart of the machine.

“Did he go to Paris?” I shouted.

“That’s what he said. He also said he’d be back in three days. He lied.” He tipped the pitch of the machine until it was nearly vertical. “The stars are constant. They never lie.” His chair disappeared into the gears, leaving me staring up through the model of the swiftly tilting planets.

“Thank you, monsieur,” I said as I jumped down.

“And don’t disturb me again!” he shouted after me as I pushed through the heavy door. As I left, I could still hear him muttering a long string of numbers as he recorded his observations.

I ran down the stair in search of Will, and hoped his venture within the house had proved as fruitful.

I TRACED MY PATH BACK
through the house, careful to tread as silently as I could through the clockwork conservatory. This place unsettled me, and I wanted to leave as soon as possible. When I finally reached the front door, Will was there waiting for me.

“Did you find him?” he asked. He was holding a contraption with a crank on the side, similar in size and shape to a jack-in-the-box.

I nodded. “My grandfather left for Paris about two years ago. He had only intended to be gone for three days, but he never returned.”

“Did Durant say anything else of significance?” Will asked.

“He rambled quite a bit about the stars and darkness. He claimed my grandfather went looking for a truth.”

Will gave me a nearly imperceptible nod. “I wonder if it has something to do with this.”

Will pulled his hand from his pocket, and a woman’s necklace dangled from his fingers. A pendant held a large jet-black stone nearly the size of an egg, surrounded by smoky crystals. “I found this in your grandfather’s room. It seemed as if he left in a hurry. He’d burned a letter. Only a small piece remained on the hearth, but I couldn’t make out any writing.” Will lifted the necklace higher, and it reflected the dim light of his candle. “Do you recognize it?”

I looked closely at it. The stone in the center felt like it could draw me into and hold me in its depth. It felt as if the darkness there could hide any number of secrets.

“No.” I had never seen it before. Not as a part of my mother’s jewelry, nor in any family pictures. “I don’t recognize it. Did you find a way past the wolves?”

Will closed his fist over the necklace and placed it back in his pocket. “I found Henry’s plans for the wolves. They do respond to sound, but they’re also called off by it. I removed the part that calls them off from the locking system within the door and installed it in this grinder. If we turn the crank,
it should keep them at bay. I also found an old shawl we can wrap you in so no one notices your sleeve.” He handed it to me, and I swung it over my shoulders.

“Will, you’re a genius.” The swell of pride that infused my heart surprised me with its intensity.

“We have a long way to go to the train station, but if we hurry, we can be in Paris by tomorrow afternoon. Unfortunately, if we take this”—he held up the grinder—“Durant will have no way to leave the house.”

“I don’t think he intends to ever leave the house again. We’ll tell Oliver about this when we return. He’ll know what to do for Durant,” I said. “Let’s go.”

We walked nearly all night, and by the time we reached Calais, I was on the verge of collapsing. Luckily we arrived at the station just before dawn, early enough that we could pretend we had merely risen for the train.

We managed to buy two tickets to Paris, though the train was nearly booked. The tickets were very expensive. The only space left on the train was a private compartment, but Will paid for it anyway.

“Will?” I tried to protest, to offer what I could from my own meager earnings in the toy shop, but he stopped me.

He smiled. “I’ve taken care of it.” He offered me his arm,
and I took it as we waited for the train to arrive. Many of the ladies were dressed in their finest, and I felt poor by comparison.

My own simple dress looked rumpled and soiled, with pale chalk dust still clinging to my hem, and the shawl hiding my torn and bloody sleeve. We looked like paupers, and yet we would be riding in our own compartment. I dozed off on the bench in the station, letting my chin fall against my chest, then tried to shake myself awake. Will told me to sleep while I could, and he vigilantly kept watch over us both.