"b.u.g.g.e.r the casks, Charles. No, look at the bones." He knelt, cursing the snow and the idiocy of interesting specimens to be found at such a d.a.m.nfool alt.i.tude, and tugged a few dirty-white disks free of ice and mummified flesh. "If these weren't obviously bones, I'd swear they were gears."

"I don't see how-" I began uneasily, but a shout further down the hillside drew his attention. Crumworth had found what would prove to be a delicate ratchet-and-flywheel system, hooked into the beast's spinal column. Abruptly the scientists shifted from a state of mild interest to feverish study, each producing more evidence from the carca.s.s.

Made, some said, pointing to the clearly clockwork aspects of the skeleton. Born, said others, pointing to the harness and the undeniable organic nature of the carca.s.s itself (the anatomist raising his voice the most on this subject). Myself, I considered the question irrelevant: the point was not whether the serpent had been hatched or constructed, but to what use it had been put and, more importantly, why it was here, on this side of the mountains from Aaris, outside the realm where it could conceivably have thrived.

It appeared to have carried a crew, though none of their remains were evident, and I could only a.s.sume they had survived the crash. I wondered whether they would have returned home over the mountains, or descended into the greater world and if the latter, whether they would in time come home again. The thought was less comforting than I once had found it. I nudged a toothed segment with my foot and watched it tumble across the ice.

"What does your valet think, Dieterich?" one of the party called. "Since he's taking his time looking at it."

Dieterich paused. "Well, Charles? What do you think? Made or born?"

For a moment I considered answering "both" and confounding the lot of them, but such was neither the place of a valet nor for a man in my current situation. "I think," I said after a moment, "that there is a very dark cloud two points west of us. I suggest we return to the Regina before a storm acquaints us with how this creature died."

There was less argument after that, though Doctor Brackett and the anatomist insisted on bringing so many bones with us that the dinghy sagged dangerously. The results were presented over supper, and a detailed report made to Professora Lundqvist.

The Professora, of course, could not show emotion, but her tank bubbled in an agitated fashion, and her cortex bobbed within it. "I believe perhaps we have left the Sterling Pa.s.s closed for too long," she said at last, the phonograph flattening her voice into dry fact.

I privately agreed.

In the morning, Professora Lundqvist insisted on taking the bones to the captain, and borrowed me for the purpose. I piled the serpent's jawbone on her tank, secured the lesser fangs to her braking mechanism and accompanied her up to the lift. Lundqvist, lacking either an andropter or the torso around which to fasten one, could not venture to the open decks, and thus we were limited to the helm room.

We found the captain, a small blonde woman with the gait of a bear and the voice of an affronted Valkyrie, pulling lens after lens from the consoles and giving orders to the helmsman-automaton. "Captain, if I might have a word," the Professora said.

"We don't have time for more of your eggheads' interpersonal crises," the captain said without turning around. "I chose my crew carefully to avoid such disagreements; it's not my fault you didn't take the same care."

"It's not about that," the Professora said with a hint of asperity. "Charles, show her, please."

I hefted the jawbone and presented it to the captain. She glanced at it. "Hyborean air serpent. I've seen a few."

"Of this size?"

"Not much smaller. You can put that down, man; I'm not in any need of it." I did so and, perceiving I was so much furniture in this situation, edged closer to the lenses, trying to catch a glimpse of the pa.s.s below.

"The serpent appeared to be domesticated," Lundqvist insisted. "And there were gears among its bones, gears that may have grown there. As if it were some sort of hybrid."

The captain shrugged. "There're 'naut tales of serpents broke to harness and pirates said to use them to attack ships like the Regina. As for the gears ..." She turned and favored us both with one of her slow, vicious smiles that the crew so dreaded. "I expect that if we were to crash and the Aariscians to find your body, Professora, they'd be puzzling over whether you were some hybrid of gla.s.s and brains and formaldehyde."

"It's not formaldehyde," Lundqvist sniffed.

"And I'm not speaking hypothetically." The captain pointed to a lens behind the helmsman. A gray cliff face, cut into deep letters of ten different scripts, receded from our view. "We've just pa.s.sed the graven warning."

I peered at the bow lenses, trying to get a better look at the warning itself. When I was a child, I'd heard stories (all disdained by my teachers) that the warning had been inscribed into the side of the mountains by an automaton the size of a house, etching the words with a gaze of fire. When I was older, my age-mates and I played at being the team engineered solely for the job of incising those letters, hanging from convenient walls and making what we thought were appropriate rock-shattering noises to match. After such tales, small wonder that my first view of the warning, some twenty years ago, had been so disappointing. Yet I could still recite by heart its prohibition against entering the valley.

The lenses, however, showed no sign of it. Instead, most displayed the same sight: a confection like matching wedding cakes on the mountainsides flanking the pa.s.s, the consequences for those who defied the graven warning.

Thousands of snub spouts pointed towards us, ranging from full cannon-bore to rifle-bore, the latter too small to see even with the ship's lenses. My eyes itched to adjust, and I felt a pang just under the straps of my andropter harness, where most men had hearts.

"Ah," said Lundqvist. "Well, it seems my timing is to its usual standard. I'll leave you to your evasive maneuvers ..."

The first of the large guns swung to bear on the Regina. Excellent work, I acknowledged with a smaller pang; the automated emplacements were more reliable than most human sentries. "Climb, d.a.m.n you, climb," the captain snarled at the helmsman. "We should already be at twice estimated safe distance."

"... although I do hope you will keep our discovery in mind. Come, Charles."

"Oh, yes," the captain said over her shoulder. "I will most certainly keep the possibility of attack by serpent-riding air pirates in mind."

Jawbone slung over my shoulder, I accompanied the Professora back towards the lift. "Charming la.s.s, our captain," she said. "Had I both a body and Sapphic inclinations, I do believe I'd be infatuated."

I glanced at her, trying to hide my smile. Full-bodied people often expressed surprise that acorporeals or otherwise mechanically augmented persons could harbor such desires. I, of course, had no such false impression, but preferred to maintain the illusion of one. "If you say so, Professora."

She laughed, a curious sound coming from her phonograph. "I do say so. Don't be a stick about it. Why-"

A concussion like the heavens' own timpani shook through the ship, followed by a sudden lurch to the right. The Professora's tank slammed first against a bulkhead, then, as the ship listed deeply, began to roll down the hall towards the empty lift shaft. The first impact had damaged her brakes, I realized, and now she faced the predicament of a gla.s.s tank plus high speed.

I did not think. Dropping the serpent's jawbone, I ran past the Professora and flung myself across the entry to the lift. I was fortunate in that the ship's tilt eased just before she struck me, and so I was not mown down completely. Instead I had to shift from blocking her pa.s.sage to hauling on the tank's fittings as the ship reversed its pitch and the Professora threatened to slide back down the way we'd come.

A second concussion rumbled below us, this one more distant, and from down the hall I heard the captain's cursing take on a note of relief. For a brief and disorienting moment, I felt almost as if I'd seen a childhood hero fall; those guns were supposed to be perfect, impa.s.sable, and yet we'd sailed by. That their perfection would have meant my death was almost a secondary concern. I caught my breath, shaken by this strange mental dissonance.

"Thank you, Charles," Professora Lundqvist said at last. "I see why Dieterich prizes your services."

"I am rarely called upon to do this for him," I pointed out. "Shall I call the lift?"

At that point, the lift's motor started. It rose to reveal Colonel Dieterich. "Good G.o.d, Lundqvist, what happened? Are you quite done molesting my valet?"

Lundqvist chuckled. "Quite. Do give me a hand, Dieterich; I'm going to need some repairs."

Dinner that evening was hardly a silent affair, as we had reached the second of the three gun emplacements, and the constant barrage made the experience rather like dining in a tin drum during a hailstorm. As a result of the damage to her brakes, Professora Lundqvist's tank was now strapped to the closest bulkhead like a piece of luggage, which put her in a foul temper.

Unfortunately, every academic gathering, regardless of size, always has at least one member who is tone-deaf to the general mood of the evening, and tonight it was one of the anatomists. He had a theory, and a well-thought-out one it was, that a serpent of the kind we'd found could be grown in a thaumically infused tank one similar to the Professora's, in fact. (The comparison amused only Colonel Dieterich, who teased Lundqvist about her stature as a Lamia of science.) By the time I came to offer coffee and dessert, this anatomist had reached the point where, if our projector had not been packed, he would have been demanding to show slides. I paused at the door, reluctant to be even an accessory to such a discussion, but it was clear that the rest of the party was humoring him. Either encouraged or maddened by the lack of response, the anatomist continued his tirade as I poured, his voice rising to near-hysteria as he argued that what could be created for a serpent could be replicated on both larger and smaller scales, down to minuscule creatures and up to gargantua. Raising his cup, he predicted an Aariscian landscape of clockwork serpents, clockwork horses, clockwork cats and dogs, all living in a golden harmony devoid of human interference. I held my tongue.

"Oh, for the love of G.o.d," Crumworth finally burst out. "Has no one taught this idiot basic thaumic theory?"

"It could happen," insisted the anatomist. "Aaris does have the thaumic reservoirs; the ones on the pa.s.s, the ones in the Mittelgeist valley-"

"It doesn't work that way." Doctor Brackett stirred cream into her coffee until it turned beige. "Yes, there are the reservoirs under the gun emplacements and elsewhere. But they're the wrong kind. You couldn't use them to power something like an air serpent."

All very sound science, of course, and the Mobility/Sufficiency Paradox was the basis of at least one Society lecture. I turned away to hide my smile, and caught a glimpse of Dieterich deliberately tapping his pipe with the careful concentration that meant he was thinking about something else.

"It's like the difference between a geothermic station and a boiler," Crumworth went on. "One's much more powerful than the other, but it's no good if you're too far away from the steam for it to power anything."

One of the Terranocta astronomers at the far end of the table nodded. "Is why no one give a s.h.i.t about Aaris."

Several members of the party immediately busied themselves with their coffee. It didn't take much to guess why, and as the person who'd handled most correspondence on this expedition, I didn't have to guess. After all, no one noticed a valet, especially not if he was there to take care of simple administrative tasks as well, and if some codes were childishly easy to crack, that was hardly my fault.

While the Royal Society's ostensible reason for the expedition was to offer the hand of friendship and scientific enquiry to their poor isolated cousins, any idiot could see that it was also to a.s.say whether air power could bypa.s.s the gun emplacements. Thaumic reservoirs might be useless for certain engineering methods, but that hardly made them worthless, as the Royal Society well knew.

At least half of the party were spies (Brackett and Crumworth in particular, each from a rival faction in the same country, which explained their mutual antagonism and attraction), and I had my suspicions about the other half. To take the most cynical view, the ship was like any other diplomatic mission in that absolutely no one was as they seemed.

As if perceiving my thoughts, Dieterich glanced up and met my gaze, and the trace of a smile creased the corners of his eyes. Yes, he was an exception to that. As was the Professora, though all of us had our reasons for being here Dieterich for the Society, Lundqvist for the prestige, the spies for their countries, the non-spies for curiosity. As for me, I'd been valet to Dieterich for ten years, in general service for ten before that, and I was homesick.

The sound of guns below us faded into the distance, as if the lull in our conversation had reached them as well. Two down, one to go, I counted. That was if the landscape hadn't changed, if my memories of the pa.s.s still held true.

The anatomist cleared his throat. "A serpent could-"

"Oh, do shut up, Klaus," Lundqvist snapped.

What happened the day after was pretty much inescapably my fault, in both the immediately personal and the greater sense. We had pa.s.sed the third emplacement in the very early hours, and while that had been a near thing scuttleb.u.t.t had it that the charts had been wrong, and only the helmsman's reflexes had saved us the mood today was light, and the general consensus that we would clear the pa.s.s by noon.

I served breakfast to those of the party who were awake by eight (Dieterich, one of the astronomers, and the immobile, sulking Professora), then made my way up to the observation deck, where I had no business being. It was not the safest place, even with the security of an andropter across my shoulders, but I hoped to catch a glimpse of Aaris before our mission began in earnest. The thaumaturges whose duty it was to keep the Regina airborne were changing shift, each moving into his or her mudra in what an ignorant man might have called clockwork regularity. I exchanged nods with those leaving their shifts and headed for the open-air viewing at the bow.

The morning sun cast our shadow over the mountain slopes so that it seemed to leap ahead of us like a playful dog. A dozen ornamental lenses along the lower railing showed the landscape in picturesque facets. I risked adjusting my eyes to see ahead.

Something twinkled on the high peaks that marked the last mountains of the Sterling Pa.s.s, and I focused on it just as the captain's voice roared from the speaking tube. I had enough time to think, Ah, so they did get my report on the Society's air capabilities, before I realized that the guns had already fired.

The next few minutes were a confusion of pain and shrapnel. I was later to learn that the captain's quick thinking had kept the Regina's dirigible sacs from being punctured, but at the cost of both the observation deck and the forward hold. What struck me at the time, though, was a chunk of wergla.s.s from the lenses, followed by a broken segment of railing that pinned me to the deck. Splinters ground under my fingers as I scrabbled at the planks, first to keep from falling through the wreckage, then out of sheer agony as the railing dug deeper. A detachment borne partly of my nature and partly of my years of service told me that there had been substantial but not crippling damage to my internals, and that the low insistent sound I heard was not mechanical but one of the thaumaturges sobbing quietly as she attempted to keep the Regina aloft.

There are times when detachment is not a virtue.

With a rattling gasp, I reached down and pulled the railing from my side. Only blood followed it, and I yanked the remnants of my coat over the gap in a futile effort to hide the wound.

The hatches from belowdecks slammed open. "Charles? Where's Charles?" roared Dieterich, and I flattened myself against the boards, hoping to remain unnoticed. "There you are, man! A stretcher, quickly!"

In short order I was bundled onto a stretcher and carried down to the lab, where Dieterich had me placed on the central table and my andropter unstrapped. The Society party's pleas to have me taken to the ship's sawbones were refuted with the quite accurate observation that he already had enough patients, and that furthermore no one was going to lay hands on Dieterich's valet but Dieterich himself. Crumworth and Brackett exchanged glances at this, coming as usual to the wrong conclusion.

Dieterich ordered everyone out, then turned on Professora Lundqvist, who observed the whole enterprise from her place by the door. "And you, too, madam!"

"It will take you a full half-hour to attach me to a more convenient bulkhead," she retorted. "Besides, I have more medical experience than you."

Dieterich muttered something about idiot disembodied brains thinking they knew everything, but he let her remain. "Hang on, Charles," he said. "We'll soon have you right as rain."

He paused, staring at the open wound in my side. I closed my eyes and cursed myself for ever having the idiot sense to join this expedition.

"Lundqvist," Dieterich said softly, "your phonograph, please."

The Professora acquiesced by extending the horn of her phonograph to the lock on the door and emitting a blast like an air-horn. Cries of dismay followed, and Dieterich kicked the door as he went to pull on sterile gloves. "No eavesdropping, you half-witted adjuncts!"

He returned to my side and with a set of long tweezers removed one of the many separate pains from my side. "Well," he said in a voice that barely carried to my ears, "do we need to discuss this?" And he held up the bloodied escapement that he had extracted.

I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling. "I don't think so, sir," I finally managed. "I expect you can infer the meaning of clockwork in your valet."

Dieterich reached for his pipe, realized he didn't have it, and whuffled through his mustache instead. "That's loyalty for you, eh, Lundqvist?" he said over his shoulder. "Man even ascribes this discovery to me. Very flattering."

"I suspected a while ago," Lundqvist said quietly, turning her phonograph to face us. "When this expedition was first floated."

"Eight months past? Pah, woman, you only told me three weeks ago."

I stared at her. "How?" I choked, realizing a second later that I'd just confirmed her suspicions.

"Your transmissions to Aaris. I monitor the radio transmissions from the Society never mind why, Dieterich, suffice it to say that I had reason and after some time I noticed your additions. Very well encrypted, by the way; I'm still impressed."

The thought came to mind that had I been only a little slower yesterday, I might have been rid of one of those who knew my secret. But the Professora, as usual, gave no indication of what she was thinking, and Dieterich only set the escapement in a sterile tray and began a search for the anesthetic. "Merged," I said at last. "In Aaris we're called merged citizens."

"Citizens, hm? Looks like the sociology department's theory about rank anarchism in Aaris had some foundation." Dieterich extracted another chunk of shrapnel, this one three-fourths of a gear from my recording array, nestled just below what pa.s.sed for my ribs. "Charles, if I describe what I'm seeing here, can you tell me how to repair you?"

"No. I mean, yes, I can, but-" I stopped, the full explanation of merged versus autonomous citizenry and the Aaris monarchic system trembling on my tongue. Had silence really been so intolerable these last years, so much that the first opportunity made me liable to spill all I knew? "If you extract the broken bits and st.i.tch me up, I should be fine," I told him.

The Regina lurched beneath us. Dieterich caught the side of the table and cursed. "You're self-repairing?" he asked as he righted himself, the tone of fascinated enquiry one I knew well.

I couldn't say I was happy about being the focus of that interest. "No, I heal up. There's a difference. Sir."

"Thaumic reserves," the Professora murmured. "Infused throughout living tissue I did wonder, when I heard about the serpent, whether it was possible. We may have to revise our definition of thaumic self-sufficiency. Dieterich, you've missed a piece."

"I haven't missed it; I was just about to get it." Carefully, with hands more accustomed to steam engines, Dieterich pulled the last damaged sc.r.a.p from underneath my internal cage and began sealing the wound with hemostatic staples. Each felt like a dull thump against my side, m.u.f.fled by the anesthetic. "Springs, even ... do you know, Charles, if word gets out that I have a clockwork valet, I'm never going to live it down."

"I suspect I won't either, sir." I took the pad of gauze he handed me and pressed it into place while he unwound a length of burdock-bandage. The pain eased to a dull ache. "What will you tell the captain?"

"Nothing, I expect," Lundqvist said, and Dieterich grunted a.s.sent. "What did your Aariscian counterparts ask you to do on this voyage, Charles? From our continued existence, I presume your purpose here wasn't sabotage."

I closed my eyes again, then gritted my teeth and attempted to sit up. Dieterich had done a good job as well he should, being an engineer of automata on a grander scale and the edges no longer grated, though it was a toss-up whether I'd have recording capabilities again. One more rivet in the vault of my espionage career, I thought, and here was the last: "They didn't tell me anything," I croaked, eluding Dieterich's offer of help. "They haven't told me anything for fourteen years."

And there it was, the reason I'd come with Dieterich on this expedition when it would have been so easy to cry off: not just duty, not just homesickness, but the need to know what had happened in my absence. I covered my face, hiding how my eyes adjusted and readjusted, the lenses carrying away any trace of oily tears. I did not normally hide emotion, but I could at least hide this mechanical, Merged response.

The Regina shuddered again, followed by a screech that sent shivers up to my medulla. Dieterich glanced upwards, pity temporarily forgotten. "That wasn't a gun." He stripped off his gloves. "Lundqvist, keep an eye on him."

"And how am I to do that?" Lundqvist asked as Dieterich unbarred the door and ran out. "Charles? Charles, do not go up there, you are not fit to be on your feet."

I might not be fit, but both my employer and my home were now up there. I yanked Dieterich's greatcoat on over my bandages and followed.

We had pa.s.sed the last of the guns, truly the last this time, and the sunlight on the decks burned clear and free of dust. Just past the bow of the Regina, I caught a glimpse of Aaris's green valleys.

Between that and us hovered a knot of silver, endlessly twisting. Serpents, I thought first, and then as the red-cloaked riders on each came clear, Merged serpents.

I had been a fool to think that the fourth set of guns would be the only addition to Aaris's defenses.

"Come no farther." A serpent glided closer with the motion of a water-snake, and its rider turned in place to address us through a megaphone. "None may enter the Aaris Valley on pain of death." Familiar words the same that had been cut into the stone at the far end of the pa.s.s, to proclaim Aaris's isolation to the world. The same that I had memorized as a Merged child. Here they were spoken, recited in a voice that bounced off the mountains.

"We are a peaceful mission!" Dieterich yelled back, then cursed and repeated his words into the captain's annunciator.

The captain stalked past him to a locker by the helm. "You'd do better arguing with the graven warning," she muttered.

And indeed, the response was much the same as the cliff face would give: silent, antic.i.p.atory, the perpetual knotwork of the serpents writing a sigil of forbidding in the air. "Turn back now, or you will die," the spokesman finished. I focused, and focused again, trying to see his face.

Dieterich glanced at the captain. "If I tell you to turn back-"

"Can't. Not without going straight through them. The Regina's got a s.h.i.tty turning radius." The captain yanked her annunciator from his hands. "We demand safe pa.s.sage!"

The rider did not answer, but raised one hand, and the pattern unraveled toward us. True to their nature, the serpents did not attack the dirigible sacs, but went for the shinier, more attractive target below: the ship itself. A gleaming gray ribbon spun past the remains of the observation deck, taking a substantial bite out of the woodwork and doing much greater damage with a last flail of its body in pa.s.sing.

"Small arms! Small arms!" The captain produced a crank-gun from the locker and took aim at the closest serpent. She tossed a second gun to Dieterich, who cursed the air blue but took it, leveling it at the rider instead.