Clockwork Heart: Clockwork Love, Book 1 (20 page)

When he stumbled back to his bed, he found Johann lying in it.

For a moment he was overjoyed, thinking he was rescued, but then he noticed Johann didn’t have any clockwork, and if Conny blinked too hard, he vanished. So Conny stopped blinking. He sat carefully on the other end of the bed too, in case too much movement disturbed the mirage.

“I wish you were truly here,” he whispered.

Johann smiled and leaned back on the pillows. “Don’t think about that. Talk to me. Tell me your troubles.”

Conny’s laugh was strangled. “My troubles? I’m captive in some French fortress by my father, who is torturing my mother until I produce something I don’t have the skills to create. My monitor tells me daily how he would like to fuck me, and I think he might be the one man in France I
wouldn’t
let you order to have his way with me.” He didn’t wipe the tears leaking from his eyes. “Johann, I think I should kill myself. I don’t want to, but it seems the only way out. I only wish I could save Mother first.”

“Come now. There’s always another way.” Johann stretched, revealing large, muscular arms, both of which were hale and whole. “You’re a tinker. This is what you do: you invent your way out of problems. Come. Stop panicking, and think about what it is you need.”

It seemed like such a simple question, but when he tried to answer it, Conny’s mind exploded with conflicting directions and goals. “I need to build a heart, but I can’t. I need to get my mother out. I need to get
myself
out. If I could get us out without building the heart, I would, but I don’t know if I can invent an escape before he starts taking her fingers. So I have to make the heart. But I can’t.”

“You know very well he won’t spare her once he has the heart. He’ll keep her constantly in peril until he breaks your mind. Turn you into one of his soldiers. Ironically, the kind of control I once feared from you.”

Conny wagged a finger at him. “Stop that. You sound like me, not Johann.”

Johann rolled his eyes and made a very French gesture with his hands, suggesting Conny was hopeless, but what could a man do? “Darling, of course I’m you. Once you’ve solved this snarl you’ve gotten yourself into, you can imagine me properly. But for now, isn’t it better if I help you think?”

Why could Conny not stop crying? “I can’t see the way out of this. I don’t know how to invent around this trouble.”

“That’s because you aren’t breaking it down. You need to get the two of you out, but you don’t have the means, and you need more time. What means do you require? What is the tool you’re missing to escape?”

Conny considered. “I could get us out of the castle, I think, but I’m not sure where we are or what we face outside the keep’s walls. Even if there were no soldiers—which, of course there are soldiers—I don’t know what direction to aim us.” He lay on the bed, close to imaginary Johann’s foot but not touching it, so he didn’t have to watch it disappear. “I could build a small dirigible, I suppose. We could go out in the cover of night. But I’d still need time to do that, and some way to disguise it while I worked.” He ran his tongue over his teeth, which he absently noticed were fuzzy. “I could possibly steal an airship, but my father isn’t stupid. He’ll have those well-guarded. If I knew the lay of the keep, I could possibly work around that, but I don’t, and they’ll make sure I never learn my way.”

“What if you didn’t have to build it or steal a ship? What if one came to you?”

Conny frowned at Johann. “How in the world would that happen?”

Johann shrugged. “You could call one. You could call
The Brass Farthing.
”

“Call? Like a bird?” He stilled. “Oh. On the wireless. Like Rodrigo’s in Italy. Except even if there were a station here, it wouldn’t be connected to Naples.”

“You can connect it. Build your own wireless transmitter.”

“
How?
If by some miracle I could manage it, they’d see it—
and
it would have to somehow get over the mountains. Never mind even if I could get this done in less than two weeks, you and the others would have to still arrive here. This assumes they’re still in Italy. That you aren’t dead. Meanwhile, my mother will suffer because I can’t produce a heart.”

Johann tucked his hands behind his head and smiled. “Then I guess you’ll have to do both. Build a wireless transmitter and a clockwork heart.”

Conny stared at him, certain his drunken projected self had tipped into the ridiculous. Johann stared back, still smiling.

Then the idea began to gel inside Conny’s head.

It wasn’t terribly intelligent to work with delicate tools when drunk and hallucinating, but Conny did it anyway, laying out schematics and building prototypes. His assistants were all asleep, and he didn’t want to know what Savoy was doing, but he decided he preferred working alone, because it meant he could keep talking to his hallucinated version of Johann, which he found more helpful than thirty pairs of hands.

“I hope you stay once I’m sober.” Conny glanced at Johann through his goggles. “I suppose I could stay drunk, but I worry I’d make too many mistakes.”

Johann, perched on a stool near a window, smiled. “When you work hard enough and long enough, your mind will relax and I’ll reappear. In the meantime, feel free to keep talking to me. Even if you can’t see me.”

Conny’s throat tightened. “I miss you. The real you.”

“Then keep working, so you can see me again.”

Conny did. He worked that whole night, until it was morning and the servants tried to bring him his breakfast and his assistants tried to come in to help. Conny tossed them all out, not wanting to break his concentration. His first task was too critical, nearly impossible, and he couldn’t afford any distractions.

The heart Félix had planted as a decoy was more than worthless—it was practically designed to confuse and entrap anyone attempting to use it or copy it. What it was good for, however, was reminding Conny what it
wasn’t
. He had worked extensively now on Johann’s true clockwork heart. He knew what it did and what it didn’t do. He couldn’t remember how all the internals functioned, and some parts of it of course he’d never seen. But the more he worked with the decoy, the more he remembered, and the more he understood.

By the end of the third day, he had the schematic, or enough of one to carry him through. But this was only step one of his plan.

His father watched him carefully. When he realized Conny wasn’t flailing any longer, only working, he stopped the dungeon visits, but he never missed an opportunity to remind Conny what fate awaited his mother. He gave Conny everything he needed, but he began to install more monitors to report back on what Conny was doing. Sometimes the archduke watched him work too.

“It certainly looks like a heart,” he remarked dryly, “but I’d hate for you to develop designs of heroism.”

Conny ignored him and continued working.

The monitors never left him, trading shifts throughout the day and night, and Savoy demanded constantly for him to explain himself. None of it mattered, because Conny knew not even Savoy understood what he was building. He barely understood it himself, sometimes.

“What is this small box for?” Savoy asked, holding up the transmitter.

“It’s a mechanism for adjusting small mechanics inside the heart,” Conny lied. He held it up and shook it gently. “Would you like me to explain them to you?”

Savoy only glowered and turned away. This was because, as Conny had learned, Savoy was actually quite a miserable tinker. He was a passable physician, and he made an adequate tinker-surgeon, but for all his boasting of electronics, he was very poorly skilled. Conny suspected his “successes” came from his assistants in a lab Conny had yet to see.

And so Conny continued his plan without interruption, without Savoy or his father or anyone in the castle knowing what he truly did.

He finished his first heart on the evening of the fourteenth day of his incarceration. His father came to the workshop flanked by eight official-looking men. They peered curiously and a little suspiciously at the heart for a few moments, and then a patient was brought in.

At first they brought in a corpse, which Conny immediately sent out. “That will never work. Automation of that level requires brain surgery as well, and I don’t even begin to know the ins and outs of that, let alone enough to restart one once it’s been dead.”

“I can do it,” Savoy said with a leer, and snatched the heart away.

Of course, Savoy could not, largely because Conny had designed the heart not to.

“It doesn’t work.” The archduke glared at Conny, then waved at one of the guards. “Fetch Elizabeth.”

Conny swallowed his revulsion. “It works. But not on a corpse. I can replace a failed heart in a living person, but I cannot reinstall life or animate a corpse.”

One of the generals, a larger, older man, stared carefully at Cornelius for several seconds. “Can you prove the heart works, without a patient?”

“Yes. I can demonstrate it here on the table if you like. It’s a terribly simple machine once it’s working. It pumps blood. It must be cleaned and cared for, but yes, this heart is functional. Better than one of flesh, in fact.”

The general nodded curtly and stepped forward. “Then you may install it in me.” The others gasped, and the archduke paled, but the general held up a hand. “The doctors have told me I’ll have another attack any day. Even if this fails, it will be worth the risk, and at least then I’ll have died for my country.”

And so Conny ended up installing the first heart not in a soldier, but a general. He tried not to reveal how much this excited him, but in truth it was more perfect than any scenario he could imagine.

He hadn’t lied. It was a perfectly working clockwork heart, one that functioned better than Johann’s, if he could be so bold. It was just that it wasn’t
only
a heart. And as the general recovered from his surgery and made plans to travel to Marseille to check on the troops stationed there, Conny wished the general Godspeed.

Because he’d sent, in the French general’s heart, a small transmitter emitting a coded frequency all but the most refined, modern tinkers would think useless noise.

This is Cornelius Stevens, and I’m being held prisoner in a French castle somewhere in the Southern Alps. The man broadcasting this message is bearing a clockwork heart that I was forced to produce. I am making more, and my father wants to use them for terrible things. Please follow the frequency link from this heart back to my main transmitter and give the location to Captain Crawley of
The Brass Farthing
at Rodrigo Milani’s villa in Naples, or to Félix Dubois, also in Naples. I wish to stop this war, and I believe I have the means to do so.

It could all backfire, of course, but he counted on the fact that so very few people understood the new wireless code. Plenty of people in Italy used it, but few understood how it worked enough to look for this kind of signal. If anyone else were able to receive his message, they were likely liberal-minded and focused on economic future, not war. Hopefully they would pass the message on.

For weeks he agonized, waiting by the little box of wires and knobs and vacuum tubes, hoping for the transmitter to let him know he had been heard. He waited. And waited. He kept the box with him as he manufactured more and more hearts for his father, these with transmitters as well. He wasn’t allowed to see his mother at all, except as display for motivation to continue working. It upset him, but he did not despair, pouring all his hopes into his transmitters.

Then one day, in the middle of a preparation for a second surgery, the bulb on the top of the box began to flash.

The assistant with him frowned at it. “What is that?”

Conny did his best to contain his excitement. “It’s nothing of importance. A small calculation device set to help me work out fine motor improvements in the heart. The light simply means the most recent calculation is done.” He dried his hands on a towel and moved as casually to the transmitter as he could. “I’ll take note of the report, reset the calibrations and be with you in surgery shortly.”

The assistant watched him as he scribbled nonsense on a notepad, eventually wandering back to his task. This allowed Conny to stop his charade and focus on translating the coded readout, hoping he was not reading the notice of his death warrant.

He could not help a brief, elated smile as he realized that no, he was receiving quite the opposite.

Chapter Sixteen

Joh
ann had nearly despaired of being able to locate Cornelius when Valentin found the list.

He hadn’t let up on the idea there might be something useful inside the odd code he’d discovered in the French-German dictionary from the magistrate’s house, and he dogged Félix constantly to help him break the cipher. Félix didn’t want to give him too much of his time, as he was busy outfitting the
Farthing
to more quickly and efficiently fly over the Alps while his network tried, in vain, to hunt down Cornelius’s whereabouts. Eventually Heng took pity on him and sat with him one night with a bottle of port. That was when they discovered the key to the cipher, and that the entire dictionary was a list of names, cities and codes for a secret wireless network.

Félix did pay attention then, though largely he was stupefied. “What
is
this? I recognize several of these names—though why in the world…?” He thumbed through the deciphered list, amazed. “I don’t understand. There are French and Austrian names, yes, which would make me think one set is full of traitors. But there are Italian names on here as well. And Spanish, and Portuguese. Egyptian, Moroccan, Turkish. Even American! This isn’t a list of spies. This is the antiwar coalition I’d heard rumored about. This is their directory.” He gasped and pointed to another name. “Elizabeth is on this list—Cornelius’s mother!”

Heng pointed to a name and glanced at Johann. “That one’s from a town near yours, correct? Do you know anything about him?”

It was a town near Johann’s village, and the merchant was well-known in the region. “He’s a good man, from what I’ve heard. Frustrated by the lack of economic development.”

Heng grinned. “See? It fits. This is a list of people who want the war to end, I’d bet my life on it. And look at this one: a duchess in Vienna.”

Crawley peered at the name and winced. “Heng, that’s no good. That’s the von Hohenburg by morganatic marriage. She has no power, low rank, and her children can’t inherit.”

“Yes, I thought that was probably the only way she could possibly be on this list. That doesn’t mean she’s without influence. What if we use this network to get an audience with her? Maybe she can help us figure out who might have Conny, since Félix’s network is exhausted.”

Crawley snorted. “You think
we
will get an audience with a duchess?”

Heng shrugged. “Stranger things have happened. Anyway, we have to try.” He nodded at Val. “I figure Frenchie knows his way around a tea party. Félix too. And Molly looks good in a dress.”

Johann liked this idea, not so much because it meant going back to Austria, but because it meant no longer sitting in Italy watching nothing happen. “They like tinkers in Vienna. Félix can present me as an example of his work. That should get their attention.”

Félix, however, held up a hand. “I’m not ready to fly into Austria based on this list. I need to do some checking first. Caution is necessary in such an extraordinary matter. We can’t risk antagonizing the war.”

“I’m tired of caution, and I don’t care anything about the damn war.” Johann slammed his clockwork hand on the table. “Cornelius is God-knows-where, and we sit here milling about on street corners, hoping for gossip. He could be hurt.”

He could be dead.

Félix would not be deterred, however, and so Johann paced the deck of the
Farthing
almost five more days after the discovery of the list before Félix agreed that yes, they could sail for Vienna.

“I have my network reaching out to the Duchess of Hohenburg, but I can’t promise they’ll be able to get us an audience.” Félix tapped Valentin in the center of his chest. “Polish your charm and keep practicing your German, because we might well need both.”

They flew out the next day. Rodrigo and his wife bid them goodbye, and then the crew, plus Félix, lifted into the clouds.
The Brass Farthing
had undergone over two months of repairs and refitting, inside and out, and as a result, she shone like a glittering jewel as she sailed swiftly over the Alps. The trip took little more than a solid day instead of the usual two, and they didn’t need to stop for fuel at all along the way.

They could not, however, land inside the city limits of Vienna. There was an airship port in town, but it was strictly regulated and generally reserved for the army generals, merchants deemed essential by the state, and the noble families.
The Brass Farthing
, being foreign and unregistered with any country, had to sit for a lengthy inspection that involved also keeping the entirety of the crew on board. Johann paced the deck, nervous at being so close to the seat of the army he’d deserted—twice—and being yet still unable to do even the remotest thing to help Conny. It was clear the inspection would take days, possibly another week, and it was highly likely they’d never be admitted to the city at all. Neither Val nor Félix could charm anyone, because the inspectors were not the sort of men who went in for such a thing.

And then the princess came.

She arrived in a dirigible of her own, a small, short-range vessel of which there had been many in Naples and which there were precious few of in Vienna. This one outshone all the ships Johann had seen anywhere, even in pictures. It had filigree that was clearly gold, not polished brass, and it managed to bleed ornamentation without being grotesque, only seeming stunning and ostentatious. Once it landed, a pair of footmen lowered a set of velvet-lined stairs, with railing, and they stood on hand to assist as a young, well-dressed and impeccably poised gentlewoman exited the vessel.

Wearing clockwork was rare anywhere in Austria, but this lady would have stood out in gear-obsessed Naples. She stood tall on high-laced boots ornamented with gear and tinker filigree, and her height was exaggerated by a high metal collar etched with intricate design and bearing the Hohenburg crest in the center. Her left arm had a delicate clockwork casing, as did her waist, a sort of copper girdle with wires and valves and knobs clustered near her navel. All this was worn over an elegant gown, black taffeta skirt and bodice over loose white silk shirtsleeves. A maid behind her carried a black lace umbrella decorated with gears and laced at the ends with wires.

She marched up to the head inspector, who had ceased his lecture to Crawley as her vehicle approached and now bowed low before her. “Your Serene Highness. To what honor do we owe the pleasure of your visit? I thought your father and mother were at Court today.”

“They are.” She opened a reticule and produced a small envelope bearing an embossed, official seal. “I’m delivering this on behalf of the Archduke of Hohenburg. We commandeer this vessel in our name, thereby rendering your inspection unnecessary.”

“The devil you are!” Crawley pushed around the inspector, who sputtered as Crawley tried to insert himself between the inspector and the princess. Johann too hurried to intervene, wondering how he could telegraph to the captain that he did
not
want to stir the hornets’ nest he was about to step in.

Before either of them reached Crawley, however, the princess snagged her parasol from the maid with her left hand, turned a dial on her girdle and rammed the very pointed copper end into Crawley’s side. There was a spark, a loud
pop
and an odd, sulfuric smell as Crawley yelped and fell backward into the inspector, clutching his side as he stared in stunned disbelief at the woman who had just felled him without so much as drawing a deep breath.

The princess calmly returned the parasol to her trembling maid, then turned back to the inspector. “As I was saying, you are no longer needed here. Thank you for your service. Please continue with your work on other vessels.”

The inspector fumbled with the envelope in his hands as he glanced uncertainly around the dock. “Princess Gisa, I don’t think it would be proper for me to leave you alone with these unsavory characters.”

“It would be most improper for you to remain when you are dismissed. As for your concern for my person, I hope I have demonstrated I may take care of myself. However, if you remain unconvinced, I am happy to demonstrate my electric parasol to you as well.”

The inspector hurried off quickly enough after that, offering to arrest the vessel’s former occupants, which the princess declined. Once the man was away from their pier and well out of earshot, the lady turned to the
Farthing
’s crew. Though she had spoken in High German to the inspector, she spoke in flawless English now.

“Good afternoon. I am Princess Giselle Elisabeth Esterhàzy von Hohenburg. You may address me as Your Serene Highness initially and Princess or Princess Gisa after that. Who among you is Master Félix Dubois? And who is Mr. Johann Berger?”

Félix stepped forward with a bow. “I am Félix Dubois, Your Serene Highness.” He gestured to Johann, who also bowed. “This is Johann Berger.”

Princess Gisa curtseyed to them both. “It is a pleasure to meet you both. I have news I wish to deliver, but in private, please.” She turned to Crawley, who had risen from the ground and stood wincing and holding his side where she had stabbed him. “Please direct us to the officer’s meeting room of your vessel, Captain Crawley.”

Johann had expected another outburst from Crawley, but the captain only nodded grudgingly and ordered Molly to lower the stairs. Princess Gisa sailed up them gracefully, her maid and wicked parasol in tow, then waited patiently on deck for the others to board. She glanced around with a critical eye.

“It is a fine ship. Solid in structure and pretty of ornament. Tell me, Master Heng.” She turned to him, polite smiles and interest. “What sort of electricity do you have installed?”

Heng regarded her warily. “I don’t know, Your Serene Highness. The regular sort?”

She waved this away. “That’s fine. I’ll take a peek myself.”

Molly and Olivia had remained on deck during the inspection, and as they took in their first glimpse of Princess Gisa, they seemed not to know what to do with themselves. Molly in particular looked taken aback and was oddly shy as she was introduced. Except the princess seemed to know not only Crawley and Heng’s names and titles, but everyone’s. She clasped Molly’s hand and smiled brightly. “When our business here is concluded, I should love to have a tour of the engines, Miss Taubner.”

Crawley kept quiet as they filed into Cornelius’s workshop, but once the door was closed, he turned to their guest with great suspicion. “Who are you,
Your Serene Highness
, and how is it you know so much about us and my ship? And what do you mean, you’ve commandeered it?”

She waved a black-gloved hand. “I had my father claim the vessel so you could fly freely into Vienna. That’s of course not what
he
thinks, but never mind about that. Who I am, Captain Crawley, is an ambassador of the Austrian sector of the Society to Liberate Europe. I understand you came upon one of our less careful members, Mr. Tremblay of Calais, who wrote out the cipher key in a dictionary now in your possession.”

The crew glanced at one another, uncertain how to react. Heng broke the silence cautiously. “We didn’t see your name on the list.”

“Of course not. It would be most unseemly for me as a member of the nobility to participate in such an organization. It would draw far too much attention. My cousin’s wife, being somewhat outside society, is perfectly safe, and she serves as my shield.” The princess folded her hands together over the table. “To get back to the cipher key. I will confess it alarmed us a great deal to find it had traveled outside the Society. However, before we could agree on how to deal with this breach, we received Mr. Stevens’s transmission asking about you, and of course, that has changed everything.”

Johann straightened, his chest growing tight and hot at her revelation. “Cornelius Stevens? You’ve spoken to him? He’s alive?” He realized he’d practically barked at one of the most powerful women in Austria and quickly tacked on a low bow and a doffing of his hat. “Begging pardon for my rudeness, Your Serene Highness.”

Gisa turned to him, smiling kindly. “No pardon needs to be begged. Yes. Cornelius asked me to convey his warm feelings to you and to assure you he is well, enough as can be expected.”

Johann wanted to weep in relief. “Thank you. Thank you so much, Princess.”

“Not at all, Mr. Berger.” She returned her focus to the rest of the table. “Mr. Stevens is in a remote keep near the Swiss border. His father has him held captive, producing clockwork hearts en masse. If he does not keep to the schedule the archduke requires, his mother, who is also captive, is tortured.”

Johann ached, imagining what a horrible position his lover was in.

Félix frowned. “But how can he do this—replicate the heart? He does not have the original.”

Gisa glanced again at Johann. “No, but he has worked on it extensively, and he had your decoy copy. It was enough. Mr. Stevens wishes me to assure you, however, he has made several modifications, which we shall soon find work to our advantage. One of these is that the hearts emit a frequency and a message as directed by Mr. Stevens in his prison. It was this which allowed us to connect, for me to give instructions as to how to improve his transmitter, and which have ultimately allowed me to pinpoint his location. All that remains is for your vessel, Captain, to deliver a rescue mission.”

Crawley gaped at her. “You want us to attack a fortified French keep full of the archduke’s finest soldiers, all bearing clockwork hearts? Are you mad?”

“I said nothing of the sort about attacking. I said rescue.” She opened her reticule again, produced a roll of paper and spread it across the table. “These schematics give the finer details of the castle in which Mr. Stevens is kept. We will use them to plan our assault and escape. Of course, first we must consult with the Society and coordinate their efforts. While your mission is to retrieve Mr. Stevens, ours is to end this war. Though I daresay I have the tinker a hairsbreadth away from pledging to our cause, in which case our interests will be perfectly aligned.”

Félix raised his eyebrows. “
We
will use the plans? Princess, surely you don’t mean you will accompany—”