Winterspell (11 page)

“Anise,” she whispered. She didn't know who or what Anise was, but maybe that man upstairs knew, and maybe it would distract the lok long enough for Clara to make her move. She forced herself to stare at the blinking lens and infuse her voice with conviction she did not feel. Something sparked in her hair—from the swinging chandelier overhead, perhaps?

“Anise! I know you're there. And it's too late. Godfather's already done it.”

Clara didn't even know what precisely Godfather was trying to do, but the words clearly meant something, for the lok's grip loosened. It cocked its head slightly in puzzlement, or, perhaps, to listen to something far away.

Clara did not wait to find out. Gathering her strength, crying out in pain as her bruised back twisted, she thrust her sword toward the lok's midsection and prayed that her blade would find a gap in the strange, corded harness wrapped around its middle. The lok jerked, putrid breath rushing over her face. Its steaming black blood spilled onto her leg.

The lok fell. Clara fell with it and rolled away from its flailing body. As she watched it die, shock settled in her mind. Her limbs were unsteady, and blood spotted her skin.
She had killed the thing that had attacked her.
The novelty of such a concept, the revelation of her own might, sent surety surging through her in a rush of heat.

She was invincible, ecstatic. For an instant the chaos around her fell away. She allowed herself to imagine slicing open Dr. Victor's own white belly, again and again, until he was nothing but a bloodied piece of meat, like the lok before her.

The main ballroom doors burst open with a great cracking sound, two loks bounding through, their tails like whips. Overhead, iron creaked and shadows swayed. Clara looked up to see a lok wrapped around one of the chandeliers, peering into the maze for a safe path down which to climb.

Something slammed into her unwounded side, and she fell hard against one of the long serving tables, now flung up on its side, a sheer, mountainous black wall. In the distorted reflection of the table's surface, Clara saw a lok rearing up to strike, but then one of Godfather's monstrous creations, a life-size clockwork soldier of metal and brass and meticulously crafted military finery, stalked forward and jerked its sword high. The blade whirred, separating into five smaller ones. When the soldier slashed, five dark ribbons appeared on the lok's belly.

A delirious thought occurred to her: Had each of Godfather's creations over the years been specifically crafted to someday come to gigantic life and defend against potential attackers?

The lok fell, but Clara did not wait to confirm its death. Three more were behind it, rushing toward her. She fled through the ballroom, dodging beasts of flesh and beasts of clockwork battling to the death. A pack of metal wolves pounced on a lok, their mechanized howls piercing the air. Another lok, its eyes clawed out, blindly snatched a dragon from the air and smashed it against the wall. It was as though this night had ripped everything from Godfather's shop and thrust it into a monstrous fever dream.

Another dragon dipped low, almost hitting Clara; one of the loks pursuing her knocked her across the floor, and shattered glass raked her skin. When she came to a stop, she looked up to see hundreds of shining daggers and the warped face of an angel.

The Christmas tree.

Clara staggered to her feet, slashing free of a tangle of light strings with her sword. The wires popped, catching one of the loks in the face. The creature fell with an abbreviated shriek, and the air smelled of charred flesh. Two remained, and as Clara ran, she held her sword up behind her, dragging it through the metal shards that had once been pine needles. Thin black daggers rained down in a luminous cascade as Clara covered her head and threw herself out into the open space beyond the Christmas tree. Behind her the loks had fallen, now no more than pincushions bleeding black.

From the center of the room came a terrible scream. It was unfamiliar and deep—not Godfather but someone else.

The image of the statue's handsome metal face sprang to Clara's mind. She searched for it desperately through the gaps in Godfather's barricade, but something higher up caught her eye.

Down the sheer slope of what had once been the staircase to the mezzanine crept the figure from the window—a man in torn clothes and covered with muck, as though he had been crawling on his belly through the bowels of the city. The man caught her eye and grinned horribly. He was pale and looked somehow . . . not right, the lines of his body not quite what they should be, though Clara couldn't pinpoint the wrongness more precisely than that. He shouted something to a nearby lok, and it turned toward Godfather's barricade, where the air thrummed blue.

Clara ran after it without thinking, too crazed for fear or strategy. A few loks broke away from their skirmishes to follow her. She reached the barricade and squeezed through a narrow gap in the glass, catching distorted glimpses of her reflection—bloodied, bruised, her gown shredded. Loks clawed through the glass after her, shrieking.

Godfather crouched at the statue's side, guiding the dragons in their work. They chewed between each of the statue's fingers and along each palm. Metal peeled away in curling strips and fell to the ground like rain. Blue sparks danced along the unfurling metal seams. The statue's handsome mouth twisted, emitting sizzling blue light, and cried out in pain.
Its voice was both human and not—rattling as a machine would, but as rich as a man's. Disbelief rooted Clara to the spot. She felt as though she had tumbled into a dream, fed by too much punch, too little food, and the weight of Concordia's threats.

“Clara!” Godfather shouted. This was followed by a vicious scream as a lok flew into her, knocking her back into a mirror. Her sword flew away, and she gasped for air, fighting to stay conscious. Stars danced in her vision—or perhaps they were the cascade of sparks now tumbling off the statue.

Godfather threw himself between the statue and the lok, blue fire singeing his hair.

“It's too late, Anise.” He gestured at the statue, chuckling wearily. “You see? Not the king's fool anymore, am I?”

Clara searched through the sea of glass around her, desperate for her sword. Her hand landed on the heel of her left boot. “A handy place to keep a dagger, inside a boot,” Godfather had said the day he'd presented them to her, beaming. “Everyone knows that. But I much prefer to use the boot itself.”

Frantically she fumbled at the hidden mechanism on her heel until the blade fell free from inside it—a slender dagger, but it would suffice.

The lok raised his paw to strike, his eyepiece flashing. Godfather closed his eyes and murmured something that sounded like a prayer. Behind him the statue's blue sparks coalesced into a great tower of light. There was no more time; Clara ran at the lok with blood in her eyes and leapt, screaming with the effort as she thrust the dagger high.

The impact threw her back, blood splattering her. She flung herself to the side as the lok crashed to the ground. It did not move.

Godfather stared at her, astonished. “Clara . . .”

From the lok's left eye socket protruded her dagger's hilt. The creature's mouth dripped black.

Trembling, Clara put her boot on the lok's head and tugged, trying not to vomit at the sensation of her dagger's blade scraping bone. She rose to
her feet, gripping the hilt like a tether. Her battered knees nearly buckled with the enormity of what she had done and how close Godfather had been to dying.

The other loks hissed in the shadows, slinking away. Ominously the man with the light at his temple had disappeared, which so frightened Clara that, weary as she was, she found her sword and held it up, at the ready.

“Well?” she shouted, shoving hair slick with sweat away from her eyes. “Are you finished with us, then?”

The only answer was reluctant lok chatter from the shadows as they dragged themselves out the shattered windows. Snow had been blowing in during the fight, leaving the ballroom a madhouse of black angles and white drifts.

The loks were leaving. Why were they leaving? And where had the man gone? Perhaps they were simply regrouping, or more were on their way.

Clara turned, wild-eyed, to ask these questions of Godfather—but he was on his knees.

Her heart turned cold and sank. She had not been fast enough. The lok had killed him, her precious, strange godfather, her dearest friend.

She dropped her weapons and ran for him, his name on her lips, but he was laughing; he was
crying.

“Look,” he whispered, pointing.

Where the statue had stood were shredded piles of metal, screaming quietly as each piece smoked to a crisp. In the middle of them, naked and glistening with sweat, lay a gasping, shivering man.

A
t once Godfather set to work putting the ballroom back in order. Clara watched, reeling from her own residual violence and the sight of the man on the floor, as Godfather refreshed the dragons with blood from his wrist. She wondered how many scars marked his body. Perhaps that was why he swathed himself in such unfathomable layers, even during the hot summer months. But there was no time to ponder, nor to examine the dragons' work as they fanned out across the glass-littered floor like a swarm of mechanical bees.

It would not be easy to carry the man outside to the stables—his body was a dead weight—but Godfather insisted they give the dragons room to work, and Clara didn't argue; the ballroom reeked of dead lok. She slid her dagger back into the heel of her boot and, once Godfather had clothed the man with his own coat, helped Godfather pull the man to his feet.

“No,” the man whispered over and over as they struggled with him. He did not open his eyes, and Clara was glad. It was hard enough to feel his body so close to hers, this body that had once been a statue—
her
statue, her inexplicable friend—but that was ludicrous for her to even consider. They could not possibly be the same.

In the cobbled stable yard they found the bodies of one of the stable-boys and the horse he had been attending. The corpses'
stomachs gaped open, slashed by monstrous claws that had left curdling, discolored pus behind. The stench made Clara gag, but once inside the stables Godfather shut the door. That offered some relief, although the walls vibrated with panic. The remaining horses pawed at the ground and pranced restlessly, bumping into their stall partitions, tossing their heads.

Irritably Godfather waved his hand at them, and then stumbled as though even that small motion had cost him precious energy. An unsteady chill jerked through the air, and the horses quieted. Though their necks gleamed with sweat, they seemed to calm, pressing closer with eager huffs, and the air smelled suddenly clearer.

Forgetting everything else, Clara stared in wonder. “Godfather, what did you do?”

He did not answer. He lay the naked man on the ground, rearranging his coat around him as best he could, but still Clara caught flashes of a hard white torso woven through with remnants of iron and marred by cruel tattoos—the echoes, she realized, of the symbols that had once been carved into the statue's armor. Metal plates capped his right shoulder and left thigh, their clasps digging into his skin. Thinner pieces wound around his forearms and calves, snaked down his belly and along his ribs like the lattice of a spider's web.

Hello,
she almost said to him, almost reaching out to touch his arm. It was an automatic urge after a lifetime of doing so, but it was strange now, him no longer being
statue
and instead being
man
. What did that mean?

What had happened here tonight?

“Don't touch him.” Godfather shoved Clara's hand away. The movement made her head spin. Her abused muscles ached, her skin stung from scattered cuts, and most disturbing, her blood felt . . .
electric
. It could have been, she supposed, an echo of the cold energy she had felt flowing off Godfather's outstretched arms before the loks had arrived; it was as though a storm had passed too closely overhead and left its echo in her veins. The sensation affected her perception strangely: the
snow lacing the windows gleamed whiter than snow should gleam; Godfather's lantern shone more brightly; and the wind outside, even through the stable walls, blew with more definition, as though someone had taken a knife to it and carved strips of it loose from the sky.

She had hit her head. That was it. She had hit her head during the battle and had suffered a concussion.

Steeling herself, she knelt beside Godfather. “Tell me what's happened. Plum and Dr. Victor have Concordia gentlemen watching the mansion constantly. Someone will have heard the noise. They'll be coming, and the police, too—maybe
everyone
.”

“Then we must hurry, mustn't we?”

She wanted to shake him. “Explain yourself!”

“Give me time, Clara, and I'll tell you everything you want to know. But it isn't safe here, not yet.”

She whirled toward the house. “Father and Felicity—”

“They're fine. Barricaded in their rooms and sleeping.” Godfather knelt beside the man and glanced up at her sheepishly. “I slipped a fairly potent sedative into the tea I had sent up to them from the kitchen. Anyway, it's not them we need to worry about.”

“You
drugged
them? And the servants as well?”

He ignored her.

Clara fought for calm. This night was incomprehensible. “Will those—will the loks come back?”

“Probably. But when and how many, I can't say.”

“Who was that man with them, the dirty one?”

Godfather's face darkened. “Borschalk. Apparently she could not be pained to come herself.”

“She.” Clara thought quickly. Always with Godfather it was a mighty task to keep up; he required constant deciphering. “Anise?”