Quest of the Five Clans: the Harlequin Tartan

CHAPTER 7

"Play your knight to the center," I advised the mouse. "That draws his forces from your queen."

The mouse put little pink hand to chin, considered knight and queen, then nodded. I put back the sheet, walked on. Hadn't that been a famous show years past? The Chess-playing Turk? A fraud, I'd heard. A real chess-player huddled in the cabinet beneath, moved the Turk's pieces about with magnets. But the mouse had been real. Eyes shiny as little beads of jet. Not that mice or machines actually play chess. Your world is not so made, nor mine.

I caught up to Zeit-Teufel in a clearing of shelves and sheets. In the center waited the monster of his affection. The other exhibits stood apart, not wishing to come over-close to their love. One could all but hear them whispering their worries for this wonder.

Best described quick; no need for over-many words to describe a mechanical dragon. Behold a bronze contraption of pipes, wheels, hinges. Something like a furnace towards the heart. Great bat-wings of leather, extending overhead. Upon the back, levers and a saddle. Four crocodilian legs, ending with brass claws. Long neck leading to a horse-like head of open jaws. Steel teeth. Glittery red-glass eyes, staring dull and dead. Zeit-Teufel tapped the head with his cane.

"Rayne Gray, I present... Fulgor, the Automaton Dragon."

I frowned in sudden suspicion of the mystery that led me here. Not assassination nor magic; but business proposition. The rumor had spread I'd become wealthy. A true rumor, if you can believe in such. I had become undeservedly rich, exactly as all the finer fortunes of the world. Combine that with my endless speechifying on the glories of the future, and I stood as a bright lamp for every moth-speculator seeking the fiery affirmation of a bank-cheque. Butcher and baker, lawyer and gun-maker sidled up with plans to invest in mills and mines, in bridges and bottled lightning, in bakeries on wheels that would deliver cakes made on the journey. In under-sea ships, cable cars to the moon, coaches of balloons to ferry troops to France. That last interested me. To sail in the sky, the world spread out beneath you like a map... If only you could command the wind, you'd know to what nation you arrived before inquiring of the astonished locals.

"I do not see Fulgor as sound commercial possibility," I declared. Best get it said.

Zeit-Teufel frowned. A how-disappointing-of-you frown. "Sir, you insult my dragon and my intent. I'd heard you were a man of new thought. Fulgor is not crass business. He is the future!"

"Mechanical dragons?"

"Exactly," he affirmed. He patted the thing's neck. The head nodded, either at touch of hand or sound of praise. "Upon his back one can cross mountains, or tear them down as you prefer. Harvest forests or houses, scythe through armies or fields of wheat, as you so desire."

"I was just talking to a mouse," I observed, walking around Fulgor, tapping the parts as I would a horse for sale. The wings seemed ornamental. Perhaps they flapped to cool the furnace. "A mouse on a chess-board. It faced off against a machine-man. Wore a turban, smoked a pipe. The man I mean, not the mouse."

Teufel snorted. "The Mechanical Turk. Very old-school. A genius with pawns but useless with his knights. Clever wheels, Pascal gears. The mouse need only endure till end-game, then he shall decimate the poor Turk."

Disconcerting, when someone takes your nonsense seriously. Are they mad as you pretend? Or feigning madness themselves? Else humoring you till they can lead you to sit in a nice corner of Bedlam. Or did they step beyond that circling path of words I denounced to the Joiner's Guild? But I spoke nonsense to the guild, and they knew if for nonsense. If any but a bloody Seraph had preached to them so, they would have laughed.