Scarcely five kilometers away loomed the gutta-percha citadel of Lord Womak, “The Lightning Eater.” Barry had to admit that he felt a small, unworthy bit of satisfaction as the first of the flaming boulders smashed into His Lordship’s castle. They had tried to warn Womak, but he had merely laughed and released a pack of flying badgers against them.
A total of ten boulders impacted. Two of them directly upon the main castle. In Barry’s opinion, the rest were quite superfluous, as the devastation caused by the first two left no doubt in his mind that the Lightning Eater was pulverized along with everything within the castle walls.
The remaining eight missiles were obviously meant to soften up the town and the surrounding countryside for the subsequent attack by the Slaver wasps.
Womak had situated his castle on a crag outside the nearest town, so the town had only suffered minimally from the impacts that had destroyed the castle. The remaining boulders rained down in a precise geometric pattern surrounding the town, and culminated with the last falling directly into the town center.
Barry forced himself to watch as each boulder impacted. It was as he’d suspected. When they had first viewed a bombarded town, the general consensus had been that the missiles must have contained explosives. But Bill had never been able to find any chemical residue for analysis. Watching now, Barry could see that there were no additional explosions, the devastation was caused by the terrible kinetic force of the impacts themselves. That was the final confirmation of his unthinkable hypothesis.
The Other had tipped his hand. Barry knew where to find him, and once there—
But there was time enough to deal with that later. The townspeople would need help, but for the first time, one of the Other’s attacks had been predicted and curtailed.
He could be beaten.
CHAPTER 1
“In conclusion, the evidence shows that there has not been a legitimate sighting of either William or Barry Heterodyne since they assisted in the cleanup of Woggleburg after the destruction of Lord Womak’s castle sixteen years ago. All such reported sightings have proved to be either fraudulent Heterodynes or simple cases of mistaken identity. However, amongst the general populace, the belief that they are still ‘out there’ fighting the good fight remains unshakable, as is the conviction that someday, they will return. This belief remains despite the fact that their castle is in ruins, their lands are overrun, their servants are scattered and indeed nothing remains but their name.”
Agatha dreamed… Mathematical formulae and gear ratios wound through her head and took shape with a feeling of inevitability that terrified her as much as it excited her. With a groan, the vast machine lurched to life, gears meshing together in a jewel-toned mechanical ballet. As more and more of the machine coalesced, Agatha noticed that the great engine was pulsing at the same rate as her heart, sending waves of energy through her like waves being dashed upon a rocky shore.
This was the answer, ringing in Agatha’s ears like a chorus of clockwork angels. Impatiently she reached forward, trying to grasp the shifting, glittering thing before her. Something clicked into place in her mind. She began to recognize the patterns forming before her. She realized that all of the surrounding space was beginning to react to the shining thing before her. Of course. The principals involved could be expanded infinitely outwards, therefore—
A vise slammed shut on her mind. A dark tunnel closed in on her perceptions and squeezed the glittering pattern down, down, down to a speck so small she couldn’t see it except as a twinkling mote of light just out of reach. With a sob of desperation Agatha lunged forward to grab it, and—
With a SMACK, her hand struck the wall.
The pain snapped her fully awake. She was gasping as if she had run all the way to the University and back, and covered in a sheen of sweat that had soaked her bedding. Her head was a throbbing ball of pain. Gamely she tried to swing out of bed, and almost crashed to the floor. Belatedly she noticed that her muscles were stiff and cramped, and that her blankets were knotted and wrapped around her in a way that told her she must have spun like a top in her sleep. As she began to unwind herself, the headache began to subside. Agatha was a connoisseur of headaches, and was relieved at the transitory nature of this one.
Once free of the bedclothes, Agatha snatched her spectacles from a small shelf and slipped the brass loops over her ears. The world clicked into focus and she was soon at her desk ripping bits off of a small machine, hastily adding others, bending wires and shuffling gears in a frantic attempt to capture the quickly fading memory within the structure of the device.
On an overloaded bookshelf in the corner, a painted metal woodsman struck a golden wolf repeatedly with a miniscule axe. First clock. An enameled couple wearing tiny crowns struck up a mazurka while a chime counted time to their bouncing feet. Second clock. Agatha began to work even more frantically. The beat of the mazurka insinuated itself into the last memories of the dream machine’s song, tangling them up and then sweeping them away in three eighths time.
Agatha growled in frustration and sat back onto her chair with a thump. She blew an errant lock of blonde hair out of her face. Gone. She touched the golden trilobite locket at her throat and sighed.
Getting to her feet, she stripped off the damp nightshirt and stretched in the early morning light that came in through her attic window, past several plants and what appeared to be a small mechanical spider. A variety of prisms caught the light and scattered it throughout the small room. Flashes of bright color glowed against her hair.
On a shelf by the window crammed with devices constructed from wire and fish bones, a small brass mushroom chimed as a cheerful mechanical centipede clog danced around the stalk. That was the third clock, which meant that it really was time to go. She would have to skip breakfast again.
She poured a dollop of water out of the blue ceramic pitcher into her washbowl and quickly washed up. Her skin pebbled in the cold air as she considered the meager contents of her closet. A white linen shirt, and her green tweed skirt and vest. These last had been a birthday present from her parents, and were Agatha’s current favorites. Long striped woolen stockings and a stout pair of boots completed her outfit. Quickly she stripped the sheets from her bed and hung them from the pole that held the bed drape. Then it was down the stairs, grab the large military greatcoat and cap that hung from her hook in the boot room, and through the door of the smithy to the outside world. The device she had cobbled together banging against her thigh through the pocket as she ran down the steps to the street.
She breathed deeply of the crisp cold air and blew out a great cloud of vapor. The sun had barely cleared the city walls and the lamplighters could be seen striding above the cobblestoned street, their stilt suits clacking as they hurried to douse the last few streetlights. It was evident that the city gates had been opened for the day, as the streets of Beetleburg were already full. Carts piled high with everything from produce to machine parts were pulled by horses, oxen and the occasional mechanical construct as they rumbled through the center of the street. On either side, the shops had opened and exposed their wares. The small fried pastries of several different cultures were hawked next to dried fruits and vegetables. Ovens unloaded aromatic platters of fresh bread. Several hundred different types of sausage and an equal number of cheeses were grabbed from hooks and shelves and consumed before the purchaser had gone three meters. Schools of smoked fish and eels hung next to sellers of hot beverages, and everywhere there was a bewildering variety of unclassifiable foodstuffs that were served on sticks.