Grey Griffins: The Clockwork Chronicles #1: The Brimstone Key (29 page)

“Iron Silk
,
”
Monti explained over the radio.
“I made the towrope myself. My boys here on the Zeppelin were the real heroes, though, spelunking into the shaft and attaching the cable. Gnomes are many things, but timid and slow swimmers they are not.”

“We can fill the Baron in later,” Logan said, before
turning to the rest of the Griffins. “Everyone back on board. We’re heading north, engines at full.” As he helped Max up the gangplank, they could see the surface of the sea. It was alive with white froth and steaming bubbles: the final, dying breath of the Brimstone Facility.

As evening approached, Monti set the
Graf Zeppelin
on automatic pilot and retired to his bunk, leaving Max and Logan alone on the bridge. Their road lay toward the Inferno Prison, where the Gateway to the Shadowlands had been kept under strict Templar military control in the frozen north. They expected Von Strife to strike there next, using the Brimstone Key to march through the Gateway with his clockwork army, where he would reclaim his daughter.

“Do we really have a chance of beating Von Strife to the Gateway?” asked Max.

“It’s hard to say,” Logan replied. “Either way, we
shouldn’t have to get our hands dirty. The forces at the Inferno Prison have been alerted, and the cavalry is on the way. All we’ll do is observe and report.

“We’re sending in a team of my best demolitions men to blow the Inferno Prison sky-high,” Logan continued. “The Brimstone Key may be indestructible, but the Gateway isn’t.”

Max thought about Logan’s role as a commanding officer of the Templar THOR division. Hardly a day went by when someone from his team didn’t risk his or her life. “Do you ever feel guilty when you send people into dangerous situations?”

Logan leaned against the railing, staring into the sky. “Everything is for the greater good.”

“Even when someone dies?”

“Everybody dies, Max. Even me. But what we do, the decisions we make, can live forever. And that’s the real name of the game.”

Max sighed. “I guess.”

“I lost my parents when I was about your age,” Logan said after several moments of silence. “Did I ever tell you that?”

Max shook his head. Logan had never talked much about his past.

“My father was a diplomat in the Cape Colony, and on a trip to Johannesburg, he stopped to help a man out of a burning car that had rolled into a ditch. There was an explosion, and neither one of them survived.” Logan paused,
then continued. “A few months later, my mum found out she had cancer. Within the year, she was gone, too.”

Max looked up, astonished at how casually Logan spoke about the tragedies.

“Dealing with what happened to my father was hard enough, but when my mum passed away… well, that shook me up something terrible,” Logan said.

“I had no idea.”

“I guess, after that, I began to understand how brutal this world could be. People can walk into your life, and the next moment, you’ll never see them again.”

“You aren’t going to leave me, are you?” Max whispered slowly.

Logan’s eyes were tired and his face lined with concern. He regarded Max for several moments, gauging the boy’s thoughts. “No,” he offered finally. “At least not if I can help it. One day you won’t need me anymore. Until then, you’re stuck with me.”

Ernie found himself wandering through the luxurious gondola, searching for Obadiah Strange. The dragon dung tea was flowing through his veins, and though he didn’t feel any different, he was hoping that it would stunt his metamorphosis into a faerie. Either way, his super speed was still intact. He still had questions, though, and Strange was the only man who might know the answers.

He found Obadiah on the rear observation deck. It was open to the arctic elements, an environment so bitterly cold that only changelings and faeries could even hope to take pleasure in it. Standing there with no walls
or windows, a person could almost imagine he or she was flying.

“I can’t believe how you survived that clockwork down in the Brimstone Facility,” Ernie began as he joined the man.

“Thank you,” Strange replied, before sipping at a steaming cup of tea. Then he coughed, his lung rattling. “It wasn’t something I’d want to do again.”

“But you’re indestructible. Doesn’t that mean you’re going to live forever?”

“In a manner of speaking, I suppose that is correct,” Strange said. “What you saw today was only part of my condition. If my body is not entirely destroyed, it can rebuild itself. However, in the event of something more destructive happening—such as the time that I was caught in the Krakatoa lava flow in 1883—my life force is transported backward to a previous point in my life, forcing me to live it all over again so as to regather my strength.”

“That’s amazing!” Ernie exclaimed. “Think of all the things you could do.”

Obadiah raised his hand to cut Ernie off. “One of the conditions is that I must be very selective in what I change. Radical adjustments to the space-time continuum can alter history. It’s difficult to understand. In fact, after a thousand lifetimes, I am not sure I do. That, my friend, is the secret to my indestructibility. Whatever it takes, my power ensures that I can never die.”

“Supersonic,” Ernie sighed in awe.

“It’s a curse, I assure you,” Obadiah returned after a moment of consideration, his eyes following the rising mist from his teacup. “I can only go backward, never forward. If I do go back, I must stay there until time catches up with me. I’ve watched my friends and loved ones die more times than I care to remember, unable to help.”

“You also get to fix your mistakes, right?” Ernie pointed out.

Obadiah Strange sighed in exhaustion. “Each time it is the same colorless world, the same tired house, in the company of the same tedious people. Nothing is novel. Food no longer has taste. Memories move sideways rather than backward. I have no destiny. Nothing to look forward to. I merely exist to continue existing.”

Ernie sighed wistfully as he looked out over the sea of ice. “Life isn’t easy for heroes, is it, Mr. Strange?”

“No, Agent Thunderbolt, it most certainly is not.”

The next night, Max was alone in his sleeping quarters. After checking his DE Tablet for any messages from Brooke, he decided to read a comic book. His eyes scanned the words on the page, but they weren’t registering. He was tired and just about to turn off the light when a flash sparked, then faded. Max sat bolt upright.

“Sprig?” he whispered, barely able to contain his excitement. “I know it’s you.”

There was no answer, but Max heard something shuffling across the floor. He got up to investigate. His eyes were immediately drawn to the dressing mirror, where, staring back at him from the other side, was his Bounder.
Max got down on his hands and knees and knocked at the glass. “Sprig, are you all right? I was so worried about you!”

“Sprig has escaped…” Her voice wavered.

Max sighed in relief, but his smile faded as he noticed that something wasn’t quite right. She looked hurt, and Max could sense her pain across the reflection.

“Sprig, what did Von Strife do to you?” Max nearly shouted.

“Sprig will recover…” she breathed. “But the changeling boy. Robert. Sprig couldn’t free him or the others…. There were so many.”

“I have to get you some help.” Max’s eyes moved over her, taking in the wounds and the exhaustion in her eyes.

“The Clockwork King will take his soul and put it in a mechanical monster,” Sprig told him. “He will make Robert do things he doesn’t want to do. Max must remember this. When it happens, there is no going back. Robert will be gone.”

The spriggan waved a shaky paw across the reflection, and the image rippled like water. As it calmed, Max could see through the mirror like a magic window. There was a laboratory of steel tables where people were bound and hidden under blue sheets. Max watched with rising fear as the doors to the lab opened. Two men entered in white coats. Their faces were obscured by masks. They worked wordlessly as their gloved hands took hold of one of the tables, wheeling it through the double doors.

Max’s eyes followed the men through a series of quiet halls until they entered a semicircular corridor with clear windows on the far wall. Beyond the glass was a cavernous room ringed with a series of balconies stacked one on top of the other. In the center of it all stood a clockwork of colossal proportions.

“The Dreadnaught…”
he heard Sprig say.

Towering nearly twenty feet tall, the Dreadnaught was armored like a tank. Its arms were bristling with weapons, and its legs were outfitted with rocket boosters. A small head with a hinged jaw sat on top of broad shoulders, and two figures stood at its feet. One was an older gentleman in a military uniform. Max knew him immediately to be Otto Von Strife. At his side stood a young woman. Her hair was silken red, and tiny flames flickered over the strands. Max had seen her face once before, though it was only a picture. It was Naomi—the girl who had blown up the Iron Bridge Academy long ago. She didn’t look a day over eighteen.

After a moment of conversation, she nodded her agreement, and a field of fire ignited around her before she flew up and out of view.

The scientists came back into view as they approached the Dreadnaught. Locking the table’s wheels, they drew the sheet away and Max could see Robert lying silently on the table. His skin was pale as a corpse, and tubes filled with blue liquid ran up his nose. The worst part may have been the incision on his shaved head.

Robert’s eyes suddenly opened. Instead of brown, they were an unnatural blue. He remained unblinking as the men in white scanned him with a series of strange instruments. Robert’s inhibitor was gone, but there was a large device planted in the center of his chest. Von Strife took a thick cable and plugged it into the device before one of his assistants attached the other end to the Dreadnaught.

There was a spark, and Robert screamed.

“No!” Max cried, as he slammed his fist against the mirror. The surface shattered and the image disappeared. Robert was gone. So was Sprig.

“
You’re going to want to come up here,”
Harley called over the intercom.

Max rushed to the bridge. The others were staring out the observation window at a ring of jagged mountains. They could just make out the silhouette of a floating tower that was tethered to the mountaintops by five heavy chains. Smoke was rising from the strange building, and the air was lit up with a barrage of energy pulses and blaster fire.

“We’re too late,” Strange said. “The Inferno Prison is already under attack.”

Just above the floating tower hovered three ships that resembled floating aircraft carriers. Cannons from the
ship pummeled the tower, laying waste to the Templar defenses as flying clockworks shot overhead, picking off the heroic soldiers.

The Templar countered. One of the enemy airships had already crashed in the valley below, where a thousand clockworks lay scattered like smoking insects.

“Turn the ship around!” Logan ordered, as he listened to his comlink. “The charges are set. The whole thing is going to blow!”

“We’re just going to leave your men to die?” Natalia cried.

Logan ignored her and repeated his order to Monti. The engines roared to life as the airship began its wide turn.

As Max watched out the window, he could see that Von Strife’s fleet had realized the danger as well. The carriers were being forced into a desperate retreat. The cannons had been silenced as the crews directed all power to turn the aerial goliaths around.

Max watched as a single ball of flame shot up from one of the towers. It hovered in the air before it turned toward the airship. As it got closer, Max could see that it was actually a girl with flaming hair… Naomi. She crossed the distance between them to hover just outside the window. Her eyes moved over the Griffins as if considering something. Then, with a nod, she blazed off in a trail of fire.

At that moment, the tower erupted in a cataclysmic explosion that sent a ring of destruction in every direc
tion. Before Max could run for cover, the first wave of energy smashed into the side of the airship.

“Get away from the window!” Logan shouted. He grabbed Max by the back of his collar, pulling him to the ground just as the ship’s windows blew inward. Shards of glass flew like razors.

The cabin pitched heavily to starboard, and the engines outside the window had caught fire.

“We’re going down!”
Monti shouted into the comlink. Furniture smashed against the wall and Max barely managed to duck as a heavy table slid like a guillotine over his head.

Natalia screamed.

Stumbling to his feet, Max could see Harley leaning out the window, holding desperately to Natalia’s hand. She had fallen through and her feet were dangling a thousand feet above the ice.

“Don’t let go of me!” she screamed.

Harley’s arm was bleeding, cut by broken glass that was lodged in the window frame. “I think my shoulder is dislocated,” he said, wincing.

“Max, get your arms around Harley’s knees to steady him!” Logan ordered.

“Eight hundred feet and falling
,” Monti shouted.
“Firing retro rockets! Dropping ballast!”

“Harley, I’m going to pick you up like a football lineman hitting a sled,” the Scotsman explained as he slid
between Harley and the window. “All you need to do is hold on to her.”

Harley managed a weak nod, and Logan exploded. Harley’s vision went grey as he flew backward, his hand fastened to Natalia’s wrist like a vise.

“We’re gonna hit!”
Monti shouted.
“Brace for impact!”