chapter 16 The Clockwork Princess
O Love! who bewailest
The frailty of all things here,
Why choose you the frailest
For your cradle, your home, and your bier?
-Percy Bysshe Shelley,
"Lines: When the Lamp Is Shattered"
To: Consul Josiah Wayland
From: Charlotte Branwell
Dear Consul Wayland,
I have but this moment received tidings of the gravest import, which I hasten to impart to you. An informant, whose name I cannot at this time disclose but whom I vouch for as reliable, has relayed to me details that suggest to me that Miss Gray is no mere passing fancy of Mortmain's but a key to his main objective: to wit, the utter destruction of us all.
He plots to construct devices of greater power than any we have yet before seen, and I deeply fear that Miss Gray's unique abilities will aid him in this endeavor. She would never intend harm to us, but we do not know what threats or indignities Mortmain will offer her. It is imperative that she be rescued at once, as much to save us all as to aid her.
In light of this new information, I once more implore you to gather what forces you may and march upon Cadair Idris.
Yours sincerely, and in sincere distress,
Charlotte Branwell
Tessa woke slowly, as if consciousness were at the end of a long, dark corridor and she were walking toward it at a snail's pace, her hand outstretched. Finally she reached it, and swung the door open to reveal-
Blinding light. It was golden light, not pale like witchlight. She sat up and looked around her.
She was in a simple brass bed, with a deep feather tick spread over a second mattress, and a heavy eiderdown quilt on top. The room she was in looked as if it had been hollowed out of a cave. There was a tall dresser, and a washstand with a blue jug on it; there was also a wardrobe, its door hanging open just enough that Tessa could see that garments hung inside. There were no windows in the room, though there was a fireplace in which a cheerful blaze burned. On either side of the fireplace were hung portraits.
She slid from the bed and winced as her bare feet encountered cold stone. It was not as painful as she would have expected, though, given her battered state. Glancing down, she had two quick shocks: the first was that she was wearing nothing but an oversize black silk dressing gown. The second was that her cuts and bruises seemed to have largely disappeared. She still felt slightly sore, but her skin, pale against the black silk, was unmarked. Touching her hair, she felt that it was clean and loose around her shoulders, no longer matted with mud and blood.
That did leave the question of who had cleaned her, healed her, and put her in this bed. Tessa remembered nothing beyond struggling with the automatons in the small farmhouse while Mrs. Black laughed. Eventually one of them had choked her into unconsciousness and a merciful darkness had come. Still, the idea of Mrs. Black undressing and bathing her was horrible, though not perhaps as horrible as the idea of Mortmain doing it.
Most of the furniture in the room was grouped on one side of the cave. The other side was largely bare, though she could see the black rectangle of a doorway cut into the far wall. After a brief glance around she made her way toward it-
Only to find herself, halfway across the room, brought up bruisingly short. She staggered back, gathering her dressing gown more tightly about her, her forehead stinging where she had smacked it on something. Gingerly she reached out, tracing the air in front of her.
And she felt solid hardness in front of her, as if a perfectly clear glass wall stood between her and the other side of the room. She flattened her hands against it. Invisible it might be, but it was as hard as adamant. She moved her hands up, wondering how high it could possibly go-
"I wouldn't bother," said a cold, familiar voice from the door. "The configuration stretches all the way across the cave, from wall to wall, from roof to ceiling. You are completely immured behind it."
Tessa had been stretching upward; at that, she dropped to her feet and backed up a step.
Mortmain.
He was exactly as she recalled him. A wiry man, not tall, with a weathered face and a neatly clipped beard. Extraordinarily ordinary, save for his eyes, as cold and gray as a winter snowstorm. He wore a dove-colored suit, not overly formal, the sort of thing a gentleman might wear to an afternoon at the club. His shoes were polished to a high shine.
Tessa said nothing, only drew the black dressing gown closer about her. It was voluminous, and concealed her whole body, but without the underpinnings of chemise and corset, stockings and bustle, she felt naked and exposed.
"Do not panic yourself," Mortmain went on. "You cannot reach me through the wall, but neither can I reach you. Not without dissolving the spell itself, and that would take time." He paused. "I wished for you to feel safer."
"If you wished me to be safe, you would have left me at the Institute." Tessa's tone was bone-chillingly cold.
Mortmain said nothing to that, only cocked his head and squinted at her, like a sailor squinting at the horizon. "My condolences on the death of your brother. I never meant for that to happen."
Tessa felt her mouth twist into a terrible shape. It had been two months since Nate had died in her arms, but she had not forgotten, or forgiven. "I don't want your pity. Or your good wishes. You made him a tool of yours, and then he died. It was your fault, as surely as if you had shot him in the street."
"I suppose it would avail little to point out that he was the one who sought me out."
"He was just a boy," Tessa said. She wanted to sink to her knees, wanted to pound against the invisible barrier with her fists, but she held herself upright and cold. "He was not even twenty."
Mortmain slid his hands into his pockets. "Do you know what it was like for me, when I was a boy?" he said, in as calm a tone as if he had been seated beside her at a dinner party and forced to make conversation.
Tessa thought of the images she had seen in Aloysius Starkweather's mind.
The man was tall, broad-shouldered-and as green-skinned as a lizard. His hair was black. The child he held by the hand, by contrast, seemed as normal as a child could be-small, chubby-fisted, pink-skinned.
Tessa knew the man's name, because Starkweather knew it.
John Shade.
Shade hoisted the child up onto his shoulders as through the door of the house spilled a number of odd-looking metal creatures, like a child's jointed dolls, but human-size, and with skin made of shining metal. The creatures were featureless. Though, oddly, they wore clothes-the rough workman's coveralls of a Yorkshire farmer on some, and on others plain muslin dresses. The automatons joined hands and began to sway as if they were at a country dance. The child laughed and clapped his hands.
"Look well on this, my son," said the green-skinned man, "for one day I shall rule a clockwork kingdom of such beings, and you shall be its prince."
"I know your adoptive parents were warlocks," she said. "I know that they cared for you. I know that your father invented the clockwork creatures with which you are so enamored."
"And you know what happened to them."
-a room torn apart, cogs and cams and gears and ripped metal everywhere, fluid leaking as black as blood, and the green-skinned man and blue-haired woman lying dead among the ruins-
Tessa looked away.
"Let me tell you about my childhood," Mortmain said. "Adoptive parents, you call them, but they were as much my parents as any amount of blood could make them. They raised me up with care and love, just as yours did you." He gestured toward the fireplace, and Tessa realized with a dull shock that the portraits that hung on either side were portraits of her own parents: her fair-haired mother, and her thoughtful-looking father with his brown eyes and tie askew. "And then they were killed by Shadowhunters. My father wanted to create these beautiful automatons, these clockwork creatures, as you call them. They would be the greatest machines ever invented, he dreamed, and they would protect Downworlders against the Shadowhunters who routinely murdered and stole from them. You saw the spoils in Starkweather's Institute." He spat the last words. "You saw pieces of my parents. He kept my mother's blood in a jar."
And the remains of warlocks. Mummified taloned hands, like Mrs. Black's. A stripped skull, utterly de-fleshed, human-looking save that it had tusks instead of teeth. Vials of sludgy-looking blood.
Tessa swallowed. My mother's blood in a jar. She could not say she did not understand his rage. And yet-she thought of Jem, his parents dying in front of him, his own life destroyed, and yet he had never sought revenge. "Yes, that was horrible," Tessa said. "But it does not excuse the things you've done."
A flicker of something deep in his eyes: rage, quickly tamped down. "Let me tell you what I've done," he said. "I have created an army. An army that, once the final piece of the puzzle is in place, will be invincible."
"And the final piece of the puzzle-"
"Is you," said Mortmain.
"You say that over and over, and yet you refuse to explain it," Tessa said. "You demand my cooperation and yet you tell me nothing. You have me imprisoned here, sir, but you cannot force my speech with you, or my willingness if I choose not to give it-"
"You are half-Shadowhunter, half-demon," Mortmain said. "That is the first thing you should know."
Tessa, already half-turned away from him, froze. "That is not possible. The offspring of Shadowhunters and demons are stillborn."
"Yes, they are," he said. "They are. The blood of a Shadowhunter, the runes on the body of a Shadowhunter, are death to a warlock child in the womb. But your mother was not Marked."
"My mother was not a Shadowhunter!" Tessa looked wildly to the portrait of Elizabeth Gray over the fireplace. "Or are you saying she lied to my father, lied to everyone all her life-"
"She did not know," said Mortmain. "The Shadowhunters did not know it. There was no one to tell her. My father built your clockwork angel, you know. It was meant to be a gift for my mother. It contains within it a bit of the spirit of an angel, a rare thing, something he had carried with him since the Crusades. The mechanism itself was meant to be tuned to her life, so that every time her life was threatened the angel would intervene to protect her. However, my father never had a chance to finish it. He was murdered first." Mortmain began to pace. "My parents were not singled out for murder, of course. Starkweather and his kind delighted in slaughtering Downworlders-they grew rich off the spoils-and would take the slightest excuse to bring violence against them. For that he was hated by the Downworlder community. It was the faeries of the countryside who helped me escape when my parents were killed, and who hid me until the Shadowhunters stopped looking for me." He took a shuddering breath. "Years later, when they decided to have their revenge, I helped them. Institutes are protected against the ingress of Downworlders, but not against mundanes, and not, of course, against automatons."
He smiled a terrible smile.
"It was I, with the help of one of my father's inventions, who crept into the York Institute and switched the baby in the crib there for one of mundane descent. Starkweather's granddaughter, Adele."
"Adele," Tessa whispered. "I saw a portrait of her." A very young girl with long, fair hair, dressed in an old-fashioned child's dress, a great ribbon surmounting her small head. Her face was thin and pale and sickly, but her eyes were bright.
"She died when the first runes were put on her," said Mortmain with relish. "Died screaming, as so many Downworlders had before at the hands of Shadowhunters. Now they had killed one they had come to love. A fitting retribution."
Tessa stared at him in horror. How could anyone think that to die in agony was fitting retribution for an innocent child? She thought of Jem again, his hands gentle on his violin.
"Elizabeth, your mother, grew up not knowing she was a Shadowhunter. No runes were given to her. I followed her progress, of course, and when she married Richard Gray, I made sure I employed him. I believed that the lack of runes on your mother meant that she could conceive a child who was half-demon, half-Shadowhunter, and to test that theory I sent a demon to her in the shape of your father. She never knew the difference."
Only the emptiness in Tessa's stomach kept her from being sick. "You-did what-to my mother? A demon? I am half-demon?"
"He was a Greater Demon, if that comforts you. Most of them were angels once. He was fair enough in his own aspect." Mortmain smirked. "Before your mother became pregnant, I had worked for years to finish my father's clockwork angel. I finished it, and after you were conceived, tuned it to your life. My greatest invention."
"But why would my mother be willing to wear it?"
"To save you," said Mortmain. "Your mother realized that something was wrong when she became pregnant. To carry a warlock child is not like carrying a human child. I came to her then and gave her the clockwork angel. I told her that wearing it would save her child's life. She believed me. I was not lying. You are immortal, girl, but you are not invulnerable. You can be killed. The angel is tuned to your life; it is designed to save you if you are dying. It may have saved you a hundred times before you were ever born, and it's saved you since. Think of the times you have been close to death. Think of the way it intervened."
Tessa thought back-the way her angel had flown at the automaton choking her, had fended off the blades of the creature that had attacked her near Ravenscar Manor, had kept her from being dashed to pieces on the rocks of the ravine. "But it did not save me from torture, nor injury."
"No. For those are part of the human condition."
"So is death," said Tessa. "I am not human, and you let the Dark Sisters torture me. I could never forgive you for that. Even if you convinced me my brother's death was his fault, that Thomas's death was justified, that your hatred was reasonable, I could never forgive you for that."
Mortmain lifted the box at his feet and upended it. There was a rattling crash as cogs fell from it-cogs and cams and gears, sheared-off bits of metal smeared with black fluid, and lastly, bouncing atop the rest of the rubbish like a child's red rubber ball, a severed head.
Mrs. Black's.
"I destroyed her," he said. "For you. I wished to show you I am sincere, Miss Gray."
"Sincere in what?" Tessa demanded. "Why did you do all this? Why did you create me?"
His lips twitched slightly; it was not a smile, not really. "For two purposes. The first is so that you could bear children."
"But warlocks cannot ..."
"No," said Mortmain. "But you are no ordinary warlock. In you the blood of demons and the blood of angels has fought its own war in Heaven, and the angels have been victorious. You are not a Shadowhunter, but you are not a warlock, either. You are something new, something entirely other. Shadowhunters," he spat. "All Shadowhunter and demon hybrids die, and the Nephilim are proud of it, glad that their blood will never be filthied, their lineage tainted by magic. But you. You can do magic. You can have children like any other woman. Not for some years yet, but when you reach your full maturity. The greatest warlocks alive have assured me of it. Together we will start a new race, with the Shadowhunters' beauty and with no warlock mark. It will be a race that will break the Shadowhunters' arrogance by replacing them on this earth."
Tessa's legs gave out. She slumped to the floor, her dressing gown pooling around her like black water. "You-you want to use me to breed your children?"
Now he did grin. "I am not a man without honor," he said. "I offer you marriage. I always planned that." He gestured at the pitiful pile of ragged metal and flesh that had been Mrs. Black. "If I can have your willing participation, I would prefer it. And I can promise I shall deal thus with all your enemies."
My enemies. She thought of Nate, his hand closing on hers as he died, bloody, in her lap. She thought of Jem again, the way he never railed against his fate but faced it down bravely; she thought of Charlotte, who wept over Jessamine's death, though Jessie had betrayed her; and she thought of Will, who had laid down his heart for her and Jem to walk upon because he loved them more than he loved himself.
There was human goodness in the world, she thought-all caught up with desires and dreams, regrets and bitterness, resentments and powers, but it was there, and Mortmain would never see it.
"You will never understand," she said. "You say that you build, that you invent, but I know an inventor-Henry Branwell-and you are nothing like him. He brings things to life; you just destroy. And now you bring me another dead demon, as if it were flowers rather than more death. You have no feelings, Mr. Mortmain, no empathy for anyone. If I had not known it before, it would have been made abundantly clear when you tried to use James Carstairs's illness to force me to come here. Though he is dying because of you, he wouldn't allow me to come-wouldn't take your yin fen. That's how good people behave."
She saw the look on his face. Disappointment. It was only there for a moment, though, before it was wiped away with a shrewd look. "Wouldn't allow you to come?" he said. "So I did not misjudge you; you would have done it. Would have come to me, here, out of love."
"Not love for you."
"No," he said thoughtfully, "not for me," and he drew from his pocket an object that Tessa recognized immediately.
She stared at the watch he held out to her, dangling on its gold chain. It was clearly unwound. The hands had long ago stopped spinning, the time seemingly frozen at midnight. The initials J.T.S. were carved on the back in elegant script.
"I said there were two reasons I created you," he said. "This is the second. There are shape-shifters in the world: demons and magicians who can take on the appearance of others. But only you can truly become someone else. This watch was my father's. John Thaddeus Shade. I beg of you to take this watch and Change into my father so I may speak with him one more time. If you do that, I will send all the yin fen I have in my possession-and it is a considerable amount-to James Carstairs."
"He will not take it," Tessa said immediately.
"Why not?" His tone was reasonable. "You are no longer a condition of the drug. It is a gift, freely given. It would be foolish to throw it away, and avail nothing. Whereas by doing this small thing for me, you may well save his life. What do you say to that, Tessa Gray?"
Will. Will, wake up.
It was Tessa's voice, unmistakably, and it brought Will bolt upright in the saddle. He caught at Balios's mane to steady himself and looked around blearily.
Green, gray, blue. The vista of Welsh countryside spread out before him. He had passed Welshpool and the England-Wales border sometime around dawn. He remembered little of his journey, only a continuous, tortuous progression of places: Norton, Atcham, Emstrey, Weeping Cross, diverting himself and his horse around Shrewsbury, and finally, finally the border and Welsh hills in the distance. They had been ghostly in the morning light, everything shrouded in mist that had burned off slowly as the sun had risen overhead.
He guessed he was somewhere near Llangadfan. It was a pretty road, laid over an old Roman byway, but almost empty of habitation apart from the occasional farm, and it seemed endlessly long, longer than the gray sky stretching overhead. At the Cann Office Hotel he had forced himself to stop and take some food, but only for moments. The journey was what mattered.
Now that he was in Wales, he could feel it-the draw in his blood toward the place where he had been born. Despite all Cecily's words, he had not felt the connection in him until now-breathing Welsh air, seeing the Welsh colors: the green of hills, gray of slate and sky, the pallor of whitewashed stone houses, the ivory dots of sheep against the grass. Pine and oak trees were dark emerald in the distance, higher up, but closer to the road the vegetation grew green-gray and ochre.
As he moved farther into the heart of the country, the soft green rolling hills grew starker, the road steeper, and the sun began to sink toward the rim of the distant mountains. He knew where he was now, knew when he passed into the Dyfi Valley, and the mountains in front of him thrust up, stark and ragged. The peak of Car Afron was on his left, a tumble of gray slate and shingle like broken gray spiderweb across its side. The road was steep and long, and as Will urged Balios up it, he slumped in the saddle and, against his will, drifted out of consciousness. He dreamed of Cecily and Ella running up and down hills not unlike these, calling after him, Will! Come and run with us, Will! And he dreamed of Tessa and her hands held out for him, and he knew he could not stop, could not stop until he reached her. Even if she never looked at him like that in waking life, even if that softness in her eyes was for someone else. And sometimes, as now, his hand would slip into his pocket and close around the jade pendant there.
Something struck him hard from the side; he released the pendant as he fell, jarringly, onto the rocky grass by the side of the road. Pain shot up his arm, and he rolled to the side just in time to avoid Balios crumpling to the earth beside him. It took him a moment, gasping, to realize that they had not been attacked. His horse, too exhausted to take another step, had collapsed beneath him.
Will heaved himself up to his knees and crawled to Balios's side. The black horse lay lathered in foam, his eyes rolling upward pitifully toward Will as Will neared him and flung an arm around his neck. To his relief the horse's pulse was steady and strong. "Balios, Balios," he whispered, stroking the animal's mane. "I am sorry. I should not have ridden you like that."
He remembered when Henry had bought the horses and was trying to decide what to name them. Will had been the one to suggest their names: Balios and Xanthos, after the immortal horses of Achilles. We two can fly as swiftly as Zephyrus, who they say is the fleetest of all winds.
But those horses had been immortal, and Balios was not. Stronger than an ordinary horse, and faster, but every creature had its limits. Will lay down, his head spinning, and stared up at the sky-like a gray sheet pulled tight, touched here and there with streaks of black cloud.
He had thought, once, in the brief moments between the lifting of the "curse" and the knowledge that Jem and Tessa were engaged, of bringing Tessa here to Wales, to show her the places he had been as a child. He had thought to take her down to Pembrokeshire, to walk around Saint David's Head and see the cliff-top flowers there, to see the blue sea from Tenby and find seashells at the tide lines. These all seemed the distant fancies of a child now. There was only the road ahead, more riding and more exhaustion, and probable death at the end of it.
With another reassuring pat on his horse's neck, Will heaved himself to his knees and then his feet. Fighting dizziness, he limped to the crest of the hill, and looked down.
A small valley lay below him, and within it was cradled a diminutive stone village, little bigger than a hamlet. He took his stele from his belt and wearily carved a Vision rune into his left wrist. It lent him enough power to see that the village had a square, and a small church. It would almost certainly have some sort of public house where he could rest for the night.
Everything in his heart screamed to go on, to finish this-he could not be more than twenty miles from his goal-but to go on would be to kill his horse and, he knew, to arrive at Cadair Idris himself in no fit state to do battle with anyone. He turned back toward Balios and with a measured application of coaxing and handfuls of oats managed to get the horse to its feet. Gathering the reins in his hand and squinting into the sunset, he began to lead Balios down the hill toward the village.
The chair Tessa sat in had a high, carved wooden back, hammered through with massive nails, the dull ends of which poked into her back. In front of her was a wide desk, weighed down by books on one end. Before her on the desk was a clean tablet of paper, a jar of ink, and a quill. Beside the paper sat John Shade's pocket watch.
On either side of her stood two massive automatons. Little effort had been expended to make them resemble humans. Each was nearly triangular, with thick arms protruding from either side of their bodies, each arm ending in a razor-sharp blade. They were frightening enough, but Tessa could not help but feel that if Will were there, he would have commented that they looked like turnips, and perhaps made up a song about it.
"Take up the watch," said Mortmain. "And Change."
He sat across from her, in a chair much like hers, with the same high curving back. They were in another cave room, which she had been led to by automatons; the only light in the room came from an enormous fireplace, large enough to roast an entire cow in. Mortmain's face was cast into shadows, his fingers steepled below his chin.
Tessa lifted the watch. It felt heavy and cool in her hands. She closed her eyes.
She had only Mortmain's word that he had sent the yin fen, and yet she believed him. He had no reason not to do it, after all. What difference did it make to him whether Jem Carstairs lived a little longer? It had only ever been a bargaining tool to get her into his hands, and here she was, yin fen or not.
She heard Mortmain's breath hiss out between his teeth, and she tightened her fingers' grip on the watch. It seemed to throb suddenly in her grasp, the way the clockwork angel sometimes did, as if it had its own life within it. She felt her hand jerk, and then suddenly the Change was on her-without her having to will it or reach for it as she usually did. She gave a little gasp as she felt the Change take her like a harsh wind, pushing her down and under. John Shade was suddenly all around her, his presence enveloping hers. Pain drove up her arm, and she let go of the watch. It thumped to the desk, but the Change was unstoppable. Her shoulders broadened under the dressing gown, her fingers turning green, the color spreading up her body like verdigris over copper.
Her head jerked upright. She felt heavy, as if an enormous weight were pressing on her. Looking down, she saw that she had a man's heavy arms, the skin a dark, textured green, the hands large and curved. A feeling of panic rose in her, but it was tiny, a small spark within an immense gulf of darkness. She had never been so lost inside a Change before.
Mortmain had sat upright. He was staring at her fixedly, his firm lips compressed, his eyes shining with a hard dark light. "Father," he said.
Tessa did not answer. Could not answer. The voice that rose within her was not hers; it was Shade's. "My clockwork prince," Shade said.
The light in Mortmain's eyes grew. He leaned forward, pushing the papers eagerly across the table toward Tessa. "Father," he said. "I need your help, and quickly. I have a Pyxis. I have the means to open it. I have the automaton bodies. I need only the spell you created, the binding spell. Write it down for me, and I will have the last piece of the puzzle."
The tiny flare of panic inside Tessa was growing and spreading. This was no touching reunion between father and son. This was something Mortmain wanted, needed from the warlock John Shade. She began to struggle, to try to extricate herself from the Change, but it held her with a grip like iron. Not since the Dark Sisters had trained her had she been unable to extricate herself from a Change, but though John Shade was dead, she could feel the steely hold of his will on her, keeping her prisoned in his body and forcing that body into action. In horror she saw her own hand reach for the pen, dip the nib in the ink, and begin to write.
The pen scratched across the paper. Mortmain leaned forward. He was breathing hard, as if running. Behind him the fire crackled, high and orange in the grate. "That is it," he said, his tongue licking over his bottom lip. "I can see how that would work, yes. Finally. That's it exactly."
Tessa stared. What was coming from her pen seemed a stream of gibberish to her: numbers, signs, and symbols she could not comprehend. Again she tried to struggle, succeeding only in blotting the page. There went the pen again-ink, paper, more scratching. The hand that held the pen was shaking violently, but the symbols continued to flow. Tessa began to bite her lip: hard, then harder. She tasted blood in her mouth. Some of the blood dripped onto the page. The pen continued to write through it, smearing scarlet fluid across the page.
"That is it," Mortmain said. "Father-"
The nib of the pen snapped, as loud as a gunshot, echoing off the walls of the cave. The pen fell broken from Tessa's hand, and she slumped back against the chair, exhausted. The green was draining from her skin, her body was shrinking, her own brown hair was tumbling loose over her shoulders. She could still taste blood in her mouth. "No," she gasped, and reached for the papers. "No-"
But her movements were made slow by pain and the Change, and Mortmain was faster. Laughing, he snatched the papers out from under her hand and rose to his feet. "Very good," he said. "Thank you, my little warlock girl. You have given me everything I need. Automatons, escort Miss Gray back to her room."
A metal hand closed on the back of Tessa's gown and lifted her to her feet. The world seemed to swing dizzily in front of her. She saw Mortmain reach down and lift up the gold watch that had fallen on the table.
He smiled at it, a feral, vicious smile. "I will make you proud, Father," he said. "Never doubt it."
Tessa, no longer able to bear watching, closed her eyes. What have I done? she thought as the automaton began to push her from the room. My God, what have I done?