Clockwork Heart: Clockwork Love, Book 1 (13 page)

Chapter Eleven

The
Farthing
could travel forty knots at top speed and five hundred kilometers on a tank of aether, but only without a great deal of weight. They hadn’t been at full fuel when they arrived at Calais, and when they added essentially the contents of a tinker shop, their capacity to travel diminished to twenty-five knots per hour with only two hours’ worth of fuel left in the balloon, which they largely spent lingering on the edge of Calais as they waited for the others to catch up. Heng had scored them a lead on a bribable fueling station at Dunkirk, but until Master Félix and Cornelius improved the engine, the crew was in a race as to what would tank them: a lack of fuel, or the French Army catching up with them.

They landed the airship just outside of a small village in the middle of nowhere, half the crew spreading out for supplies while Molly and Johann helped the tinkers come up with a solution.

Cornelius had been tweaking the engine since he’d gone on board
The Brass Farthing
, but he’d been doing this missing almost every necessary tool and by repurposing material completely ill-suited for the task. Now he had every tool he could possibly dream of, more options for raw materials than most engine shops, and the unparalleled mind of his mentor. His greatest problem was remembering to hurry instead of amusing himself with endless possibility.

Molly generally saw to keeping him on task. As ship engineer, she knew her way around an engine, and she wasn’t keen on, as she put it, Félix and Cornelius’s fancy tinker business. “I thought you were
surgeons
, not engine-makers.”

“Oh, every tinker is a dabbler.” Félix squinted through his half-moon glasses at a set of gears as he tapped it with a wrench. “My first apprenticeship was to a tinker-builder. He once made me take a prototype aether train engine apart and put it back together, all by myself. Twice.” He smiled wistfully. “Quite possibly the best three weeks of my life.”

“Clockwork is clockwork.” Cornelius wiped sweat from his brow with his wrist and pushed his goggles higher onto his head. “Whether it powers an airship or turns a wrist, it’s a machine. It does what it’s told and works with what it’s given. It’s more than building it well too. Give it quality fuel and treat it well, and it will work powerfully until its parts run out—and most of those can be replaced. Neglect it, give it shoddy support, and it will falter.” He sighed and unscrewed the panel to a dirty set of gears. “Clockwork is so beautifully simple. It’s people who are complicated.”

He felt someone watching him, and when he turned, he saw it was Johann, looking thoughtful. He was shirtless in deference to the heat in the close chamber, his assigned task to haul and push and fetch whatever the tinkers needed. He didn’t wear his eyepatch, either, so he was a beautiful display of clockwork and muscle and beauty. Heng had braided his hair into a dazzling array of thin strands to help keep it out of his way, and it hung about his stubbled chin in dark cords like the most beautifully woven cable. Had the two of them been alone, or even not pressed for time, Cornelius would have asked to be fucked. They’d made love several times now, and during those encounters Cornelius had discovered how aroused he became when Johann held him with both clockwork and flesh grips, and how the hard press of copper against his thigh as Johann fucked into him made his own bones turn to liquid.

When they broke for lunch, he couldn’t handle it any longer. Leading Johann away from the others, he pressed him against a tree before falling to his knees and unlacing Johann’s trousers. He wanted to feel Johann’s clockwork leg against his hand as he stared, throat full of cock, at that amber eye.

Johann threaded shaking fingers into Cornelius’s hair. “We need to be vigilant. We might need to flee at any moment.”

Cornelius nuzzled Johann’s balls, inhaling the musky scent of sweat, licking the wiry hair. “You be vigilant. I’ll suck you until you’re iron, and then you can make me face the ship while you pound into me from behind.”

The dirty talk undid his lover, a trick Cornelius had learned during their brief time of fucking one another. He couldn’t do much more than mewl now, as Johann fucked his mouth, but when Johann pushed him away, kneeling behind him as Cornelius made quick work of his trousers, Conny offered a litany of crude commentary, in French because it made Johann all the more desperate. He told his clockwork soldier to fuck him like a dog, to pull his anus wide and spit into it before spearing him with his fat meat. That was the only place where Johann resisted, however.

“It is not enough. You will hurt.”

Bless Johann and his illusion Cornelius was a frail flower. “Yes, darling. It will burn and throb all afternoon. I won’t be able to think of anything else but how beautifully you bugger me, and by the end of the day I’ll be your dog, begging you to fuck me over the dinner table. Maybe that’s what you’ll do. Take me like your whore while the crew watches your cock pound me, while I beg you for more.”

This pretty speech undid Johann so much he barely spat at all, working the tiniest bit of saliva into Cornelius before driving inside. Cornelius cried out, whimpered and demanded more, harder, faster. It went on forever too, because he’d wrung Johann out twice this morning. By the time Johann finished, Cornelius’s backside and thighs throbbed with use. After he spent on the grass, he rose shakily and raised his trousers, only to feel Johann’s spending leaking out of him.

He practically purred in happiness.

They had their lunch then, Cornelius lying on his side with his head on Johann’s fleshy thigh. “I think we nearly have the engine sorted,” he told his lover between bites of crusty bread. “If they find a fueling station, we should be able to get all the way to the border of the Austrian Empire.” He closed his fingers over Johann’s hand on his hip, tucking it tighter against his body. “We wanted to get enough to go all the way to Italy, but the Alps will take their toll. Molly says it will be a challenge to fuel again. I’m hoping Félix and I can trade tinker skills for aether over the border.”

Johann’s clockwork hand stroked Cornelius’s hair. “Can you get to Stallenwald?”

Cornelius did some mental calculations. “I think so, yes. Oh—that’s right, they have aether mines. The best in Europe, so I’ve been told. Father has long bemoaned that he can’t conquer them. But how could we convince them to part with their store? They supply directly to the Austrian Army.”

“The mines are run by my uncle. He will help us.”

Cornelius sat up, looking Johann in the eye. “You’re from Stallenwald?”

Johann nodded. “They’ve never had a tinker there. They will trade dearly for your skills.”

“And you can see your family.” Remembering Johann’s hesitation over his clockwork, he touched his lover’s chest. “Will they be angry with me for changing you?”

Johann’s smile made warmth spread inside Cornelius. “No. They will be glad you saved me.”

Cornelius smiled back. “Then Stallenwald is where we’ll go.” He pushed bread into Johann’s mouth. “Eat your lunch, so we can get ready to travel.”

Johann chewed the bread, but when he swallowed, his face had a different kind of hunger. “Would you truly do that—let me take you in front of the others?”

Cornelius’s backside throbbed beautifully as he leaned in to kiss Johann’s cheek and whisper in his ear. “Yes. Is…that exciting to you?”

“Yes.”

He smiled as Johann nuzzled him. Conny knew his soldier-pirate well enough to understand that as much as the prospect of doing Cornelius in front of an audience excited him, he wasn’t ready for such a lewd display.

Yet.

* * * *
*

Johann didn’t think his family would reject him for his clockwork. That didn’t stop him from being more and more nervous as they drew closer to the Austrian border. They’d flown in from the north of Stallenwald, so they took in as few mountains as they could, and as they closed in on Johann’s village, he busied himself with leading them over the top of the forest, keeping out of sight of the mining scouts while making sure they still had a place to land. He brought them down on the
Platz
, which he hoped still abutted his cousin Fredrick’s smithy. It did, and Fredrick himself, beard rippling and hammer swinging, came out to see who the devil had landed on the city square.

Johann made sure he was the first off the ship without a weapon, his arms extended. “Fredrick,” he called out as his cousin approached. He wore his patch, a jacket and gloves, though his leg clockwork was visible if one paid close attention to the way his boots were affixed. He hoped he still looked himself enough that his cousin recognized him. “It’s me, Johann Berger. Your cousin. Jacob and Bertha’s son.”

Fredrick lowered the hammer, his eyes first narrowing in disbelief, then opening wide in shock. “Johann? But you’ve gone to war! How are you here? And on an airship?”

“It’s a long story best told over drink.” He gestured to
The Brass Farthing
. “While I tell it to you, my friends would love to offer some trades. Our cargo is so heavy, we need to lessen it. And we have two tinkers, one the best in France, who would love to work on anything anyone in town has to bring them. Free of charge for my home village.”

Fredrick’s laugh came from the bottom of his belly.
“Ja
, we will trade, and we can put the tinkers to work.”

“We are also in need of fuel. I was hoping the
Bürgermeister
might help us make a deal with the mines.”

“If your tinkers can fix the plumbing to his upstairs bathroom, he’ll probably give you the moon. I’m sure something can work out either way, though.”

Master Félix had wandered over to them, and he smiled through his white beard as he spoke in perfect German. “I can give the mayor plumbing in every room, and a device to send hot water wherever he likes it. As hot as he’d like.”

Fredrick touched his nose. “Now, don’t go too far, or his
wife
will run off with you, and then you won’t get your fuel.”

Félix and Fredrick went off together, chatting amicably and making plans as Crawley directed the others as they exited the airship. Johann ended up shepherding Valentin and Cornelius wherever he went. Cornelius knew a handful of words from their own exchanges, but in practical use he and Valentin were rendered utterly helpless in a village where Johann was the only native resident with multilingual ability.

Johann understood why Crawley had given him Valentin, but he wished he could have had a pardon of an hour. Because before he did anything else, he had a stop to make, and he didn’t want the judgmental Frenchman along if he could help it. Since that wasn’t an option, he went to his family’s small house on the edge of town with his lover and his lover’s pouting friend in tow.

He knocked on the door, all his lies about how he wasn’t nervous fleeing as he admitted how much it would hurt if his mother saw how he’d changed and recoiled. It was she who answered his knock, and at first seeing her was worse than having her recoil, because it was clear she didn’t recognize him.

He removed his hat and clutched it over his heart. “
Guten Morgen, Mutter
.”

She blinked at him a few times. Then she clapped her hands over her cheeks, her eyes wide and full of tears. “
Johann
.
Mein geliebter Sohne.
”

If she was repulsed by how much clockwork she felt when she embraced him, she hid it well. In fact, she crushed him tight to her body, pulling him down so she could bury her face in his neck. She ushered them all inside, but she never let go of Johann. She put him on a chair in the kitchen and sat before him, touching him all over as if it were the only way she could believe he was real.

“You came home. You came home.” She touched the thread of his eyepatch with sadness. “You lost an eye. I’m sorry, darling. I’m so sorry.”

“I lost many parts. So many I nearly died.” It was starting to bother him she hadn’t mentioned his clockwork. He held up his arm, gestured to his legs. Then he nodded at Cornelius. “He gave me new arms, legs. Organs. Nursed me to health. Saved my life.”

Stole my heart. In every way possible.

Johann’s mother rose, hand over her breast as she approached Cornelius reverently. With a sob, she took his hands, kissing his fingers over and over. “Thank you. Thank you for giving me back my son. Thank you. Thank you.”

Cornelius looked ready to cry too. “
Bitte
.”

They stayed the whole afternoon, far longer than Johann had planned, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave. His mother made them stay in the kitchen while she cooked all his favorite foods, plied them with beer and news about every member of his family, his neighbors, and everyone in the village. Assured him she’d received the money he’d sent, and thanked him for it. She asked for his stories, of the war and of his time as a pirate.

She was in the middle of coaxing him into eating a fifth sausage and another bowl of kraut when the front door burst open and Johann’s father came in.

He
noticed the clockwork right away, and it seemed to punch him in the belly. But when he drew Johann into a tight embrace, none of that mattered. All Johann knew was that his father welcomed him home. Sat beside him at the table, listened intently to his stories. Welcomed his friends.

Took his hand, squeezed it hard with tears in his eyes, and said, “I’m proud of you, my son.”

Valentin and Cornelius were largely quiet during the visit, but when Heng came by to ask for their help with something at the mayor’s house, Johann thanked them for their patience. “It was good to see my family. It wasn’t something I thought I’d ever do again.”

Cornelius began to take Johann’s hand, remembered where they were, and thought better of it, though he leaned against him briefly as a compromise. “It was a pleasure to watch the reunion. I only wish I had even half that love from either of my parents.”

Johann glanced at Valentin, who looked pensive. “Where are your parents?” Johann asked in French.

Valentin startled out of his thoughts, then made a dismissive and very French wave of his hand. “A house party somewhere, no doubt. They go where they like. They’re fond of Paris, but only the pretty parts.”