The Toymaker's Apprentice (28 page)

“THE ASSASSIN.
Where is he?” the King of Mice demanded. He paced the hard-packed floor as his piebalds scrambled to answer.

One tough-looking mouse stood to attention while the others conferred behind him. “Sires, we have followed the clockmaker and his companions to three locations. The main market, the gardens, and a private home off a residential square. Our spies are attempting to infiltrate. We should know which of the three harbors the assassin within the hour.”

“An hour is a lifetime,” Roland said.

“Too long
!
” Genghis spat. “We should attack them all. Teach these men to fear us
!
Take the city, and our mother's killer will also fall.”

Charlemagne hissed through curled lips, balling their paw into a fist. “The city. We'll crush it as we did Boldavia. For mousedom.”

“For Mother
!
” Arthur said. He turned his brothers away from the gathering of spies until they faced one of the soaring cavern walls. The underbelly of Nuremberg was unlike anything they had ever seen. The constant roar of the river above- and belowground was similar enough to the susurration of Boldavia's shoreline, but there was another sound. A grinding, as if the bones of the very earth were breaking. It made Arthur uneasy.

The wheels of the world were turning. At any moment he could be crushed.

But not before he took the life of the boy that killed his mother. Let his brothers become emperors and rulers of Men. Arthur no longer cared. His mother was dead, and with her his last hope of love. He had no heart for conquest, but he would have his revenge. As long as he lived up to one-seventh of her expectations. Let his brothers do the rest.

He turned to his spies. “Take them.”

The piebalds looked up from their plans, like pigeons scrounging for feed in a park.

“Sire?” the tough one said apologetically.

“Three targets. Take them all. We will not wait a moment longer. Vengeance is at hand.”

The piebald hesitated. “The townhouse and the villa, yes, but sire . . . the marketplace? It is what the men call a holiday. The square is unmanageably large and packed with them. I am afraid it is strategically impossible.”

“Impossible?” the King said coldly, his voices harmonizing in a way that made even Arthur's fur crawl. “
We
are impossible. Yet, Boldavia is ours.
You
are ours. If it costs us your life, we will spend it gladly. For the honor of our fallen Queen.”

The piebald blanched, a strange effect behind his mottled fur. “Sire.” He dropped to one knee and bowed until his whiskers brushed the ground.

“WAKE UP, BEAUTIFUL BOY.
Wake up
!
”

A cool hand slapped his cheek. Stefan blinked his eyes open.

“Mother?”

“I should hope not,” a wry voice replied.

“What?” Stefan rubbed his eyes with stiff wooden hands. His lids rasped over the hardened orbs. His body creaked when he moved, like an old ship bobbing at sea. But his arms and legs seemed to obey his commands. He looked at his wrist. A well-carved ball-and-socket joint allowed his hand to swivel, almost like a real wrist. It loosened up as he worked it round, becoming more natural with each revolution. Next, he cracked his fingers. They clacked open and closed, each joint as well made as the most poseable of his father's toys. He sighed and blinked.

A girl was standing over him.

“Clara
!
”

She smiled. “Not exactly.”

He sat up, his waist bending oddly at what he realized was now a hinge. His heart beat furiously in its frozen cage. “Beautiful?”

“Thank you,” she said with a little curtsy.

“No, not you—”

“Oh. I see.”

“No
!
I mean, of course you. You're beautiful. But you called
me
beautiful. It's not dark enough in here to make that mistake.”

Clara's smile returned. She dropped down to sit beside him.

He was in a bedroom, he realized. A rather nice one, with a soft mattress and walls full of books and well-made dolls. Carefully, he pulled himself up farther and rested his back against the pillows.

His knuckles had seams and little carved joints. They didn't feel quite like his own, nor did the rest of his body. He felt like a marionette, but one that he could control with his mind. Like he'd told Princess Pirlipat, he appeared to be well made. He touched his face with a clack of wooden fingertip on wooden skin. Well made, but ugly.

“Of course you're beautiful, Stefan,” Clara said. “Any boy who has gone through what you've obviously suffered and still kept this next to his heart”—she held up the folded square of linen—“is beautiful indeed.”

Stefan felt himself blush, his wooden cheeks flushing with sap. At least that part of himself still worked normally. “I told you I'd keep it with me,” he replied.

“Of course you did. It's what all young men say, but not what most of them do.” Her smile faded into a gentle look of tenderness. She dropped the handkerchief to his chest and patted it. “And I owe you an apology. I did what young women do. I lied about my name.”

“It isn't Clara?”

“Clara's our maid.”

“But why?”

“Because proper young ladies don't hide in the arboretum with their toes in the dirt when they're meant to be home learning to be dull. If Arno had known I was more than a simple
maid, he'd have thrown me out long ago. Imagine the scandal, a groundskeeper alone with the unescorted daughter of a respectable family. It would be in all the papers, and give my mother a heart attack
!
As would a talking nutcracker, I suppose. But you won't turn me in, will you?”

“I . . . no, never.” He struggled to keep up with the quickness of her tongue.

“Good. Then, my real name is Marie. Marie Stahlbaum.”

Her eyes dropped significantly to the handkerchief with its neatly embroidered “S.”

“Of course.” Had he still been made of flesh, his already red face would have also gone hot. Humiliation on top of humiliation.

Why had Christian brought him here, of all places?

“But that changes nothing else,” she said. “A rose by any other name, and all that. Though I prefer tulips, and seem to be more of a dandelion, personality-wise.”

Clara, now Marie, was just as he remembered her. The warm brown eyes, the shining braids. She had been in his thoughts since the day they met.

Stefan groaned and she gripped his hand. “What is it?”

“I've just realized, I've written an awful lot of letters to your maid.”

“Then let's hope the mail is slow.” Marie smiled and her eyes danced.

Stefan struggled to form a grin, but could not. “Worse. I forgot to mail them.”

“Never mind the letters, my poor nutcracker,” Marie said,
smoothing his cheeks with her hand. “It seems you've had quite an adventure. Sit up now, and tell me all.”

Like poison leeched from a wound, the story came out.

The death of his mother, his flight from Nuremberg. Losing Christian. The Pagoda Tree. The teeth, the princess, the nut. The Queen of Mice.

“That old wolf has gotten you into more trouble than either of you can handle,” Marie surmised at the end. “My godfather is many things, but uncomplicated isn't one of them.”

“Christian's your godfather?”

“I'm afraid so. More like an uncle, really. You know he was orphaned and raised by my father's family?”

Stefan laughed a short, harsh bark. “I know nothing about him. He showed up on the worst day of my life, shook the world upside down, and—”

Something flickered in the corner of the room. The same sort of flicker he had seen in the throne room of Boldavia. The vermin couldn't possibly have reached Nuremberg so quickly.

But they had.

The mouse came into full view and headed straight for Marie.

“No
!
Leave her alone
!
” Stefan cried, and leapt up from the bed to throw himself at the creature.

The mouse squealed as Stefan came down, pounding his wooden fist.

Marie leapt up onto the bed. “Kinyata
!
” she cried.

A great orange cat with yellow eyes emerged from the hallway, pressing the door open with her huge weight. Glancing curiously at the wooden boy on the floor, and the mottled brown
mouse in his grasp, the cat decided on the familiar, and went after the mouse.

Stefan pulled away as the cat batted its prey. The mouse let out a high-pitched squeal that made even Stefan's sap turn cold. A moment later, there was a crunch. A pink tail twitched in the corner of the cat's mouth, and was gone.

Kinyata smiled, prowled the perimeter of the room, and then, seemingly satisfied, left again.

Stefan and Marie stared at each other. The silence was broken when Christian burst through the door in his robe.

“Marie
!
” He shut the door behind him. This was not something for the rest of the household to hear. “Gods, Stefan, you're awake
!
Have you frightened this girl?”

Stefan's jaw worked, but no sound came out.

Before he found his voice, Marie stepped in. “No, Uncle, in fact he saved me. From a mouse,” she said, climbing down to sit on the settee.

Christian's face turned gray. He helped Stefan up from the floor. “They've found us, then.”

“No,” Stefan replied, with a glance toward Marie. “I caught the mouse. But her cat—”

“Kinyata,” Marie said, nodding.

“Kinyata . . . finished him off. They might not have word yet.”

“I see.” Christian sighed and joined his niece on the settee. “Marie, this is Stefan Drosselmeyer. My cousin's son.”

“We've met,” Marie said.

Not as recently as he probably believes
, Stefan thought.

Christian nodded. “He lives on the other side of town. I feared he wouldn't be safe there, so I brought him here.”

“Is anyone hungry?” Marie asked.

“Actually, I'm starving,” Stefan said.

“Me too. I'll get you some soup so you don't try your jaw.” She fixed her uncle with a stern look.

Stefan was surprised to see Christian blanch under that glare.

“And when I return, Uncle, you'll tell us how you plan on fixing this mess.”

GULLET HURRIED THROUGH
the tunnels as quickly as his feet would carry him. On his head he wore a miner's helmet with a red lantern affixed to the center. It made him look like a crimson-eyed cyclops. Between his lips, he held a small silver pipe that he blew into every so often. It could not be heard by human ears, but it was certain to keep all rodents away.

Most of the Brotherhood was spread out across the city aboveground. While the City Clock lay in the catacombs, the city's
clocks
perched in church steeples and towers far above the madding crowds made for good lookout points. An advantage when your city was under siege, and as safe a location as any when the enemy came swarming from underground. But there was one place where the clockmakers still held sway beneath the city.

A position to be maintained at all cost.

Within minutes, Gullet had reached the Cogworks. Pausing to insert some ear plugs, he cranked the door wide and sealed it shut behind him. Within the great room, the shimmering gears of the City Clock moaned as if in pain. Gullet had lived long enough to witness a shift in the clock once before, years ago. When the Black Plague spread through Barvaria, thousands of shining cogs had shifted and fallen away. So many deaths had devastated the clock movement, and it hurt his bones as deeply then as it did now.

But Gullet was not a sentimental man. It had taken years for all of the fallen cogs to be replaced with new ones. But it had happened, and balance had been regained. So it would be again, in due time.

Gullet waved a short arm over his head at the cogsmen on shift. Brühl and Waltz waved back, but only Brühl clambered down from the scaffolding. The man wore goggles and ear plugs, and a belt over his leather apron. The belt held a jar of grease for the gears and a variety of wrenches and keys for fine-tuning the clock. They often had to adjust for drag on the pendulum caused by moisture in the atmosphere. The job of the cogsmen was to keep the City Clock running accurately. Which often meant clearing debris and, quite literally, bugs. The insect kingdom was one of the few that proved near impossible to regulate by city clockery.

“How's she holding?” Gullet asked when Brühl was close enough to hear him over the churning of the machinery.

He was a lanky fellow with a tendency to shrug. He did so now, almost apologetically. “She'll hold, but she's shifting and there's not much we can do to stop it.”

Gullet nodded and led the cogsman over to the desk-size replica of the Cogworks. He pointed to the rod of the pendulum, where it was anchored onto a large gear.

The movement of the entire mechanism was managed with weights that hung from chains looped over the teeth of a series of gears—each weight controlled the hour, the minute, the second, the chime, like any pendulum clock. But this was a City Clock, and far more complex.

There were weights for all the kingdoms of Man and Animal,
for the planets, the seasons, and any other measurable unit of time. The weight assigned to the Kingdom of Mice had been shifting ever since the mouse army turned its head toward Nuremberg. Soon, the pendulum would swing to a different beat.

“We can't stop it from here, but we can slow things down a bit.”

“Sir?” Brühl asked. “You mean . . . tamper with the weights?” It was interference of the highest order, and something no self-respecting member of the Brotherhood would ever attempt to do.

“Don't be ridiculous, Brühl. Just lower the pendulum. We can't shift the balance, but we
can
slow down time. The world will take its course either way, just not as fast as it might like.” He jotted a few names and dates on a scrap of paper and thrust it at the cogsman. “Here. When we're finished, adjust the cogs for these names, along with those of the Brotherhood. We'll need agents afoot during this madness.”

Unlocking a cabinet against the wall, Gullet revealed a series of keys and wrenches hanging from hooks. He removed the largest of these, a socket wrench the size of his leg, and hefted it over his shoulder. “Can you manage the basket, or shall I?”

Brühl glanced about nervously. “I . . . uh . . .”

Gullet rolled his eyes. “Just the basket, Brühl. This is my task to complete. Be quick. And set the organ playing,” he added, holding up his silver pipe. “We need to keep this room clear.” A self-playing organ had been installed in the cavern years ago, tuned to deter various sorts of vermin as needed. It would not play forever, but wound properly, the mice would steer clear of the Cogworks for a while. “Buck up, now. I'll be back soon.”

The cogsman sighed with relief, took the wrench from Gullet, and scurried to set up the basket.

Gullet craned his neck. The pendulum swung through this chamber every thirty-seven minutes. It would hover overhead for less than twenty seconds. At the end of the great golden disc was a small hexagonal nut, the size of a man's fist, made of the same shining metal and bolted to the base of the rod. This was the adjusting nut for which the socket wrench had been designed.

Time was slipping away. The gears of the great clock clamored in tiny increments. Gullet checked his pocket watch out of habit. He clapped the brass casing open and closed, ticking off the seconds.

“Sir, ready when you are,” the cogsman said. A breeze lifted the hair off the top of his head. The pendulum was swinging nigh.

Brühl operated the pulley system to raise Gullet in a basket usually reserved for hoisting cleaning crews into the works. Moments later, the great disc swung into view. Brühl threw his weight against the levers, keeping the basket beneath the gliding saucer. Gullet took a steadying breath, slipped the socket wrench onto the pendulum, and gave the adjustment nut a counterclockwise quarter-turn twist.

Nuts
, Gullet thought bitterly a few moments later, shutting the door to the Cogworks behind him. He blew on his silver pipe and adjusted the wick on his lantern. This whole Boldavian misadventure came down to a handful of nuts.

At least this one would buy Christian some time. He hoped that it would be enough.