Clockwork Dragons Must Die!
by John Schoffstall

It is a tale out of the Clockwork Worlds, where the planets, sun, and moon orbit the earth on epicyclic gears of brass and steel, where the sun is a globe of polished brass, the moon a sphere of battered silver, and the earth itself a vast spinning mechanism of innumerable gears, cogs, cams, chains, pistons, levers and ratchets, ever moving, ever working, ever clanking and whirring and tap-tap-tapping with sound.

It chanced that the town of Gearwyk was troubled by the appearance of a clockwork dragon. Ever and anon the great worm swooped over the town's houses and parks, her fiery breath melting the painted tin trees and the mechanical songbirds that nested in them, blackening the buildings with soot, scattering the clockwork citizens to cower in their houses. With a loud 'Crack!' the crystal of the giant clock in the Town Council tower shattered with the heat of her breath, and the Mayor cried, "Enough! Gearwyk can bear no more! The clockwork dragon must die!"

He summoned the town's most eminent citizens to this task. First came the Turkish Chess-playing Automaton, whose gearing was the most complex and thoughts the most subtle of all the clockwork folk.

"I cannot go, I have three and twenty chess matches and challenges yet to complete," the Turk protested, but the Mayor would hear none of it, and threatened to cancel all his matches and defrock him of his grandmaster title if the Turk did not join the dragon hunters. The Turk's gears whirred in annoyance under his silk turban, and his painted steel eyelids clinked up and down, but he finally agreed under protest.

Next the Mayor picked Wheelhart Cogswell the tinker, who knew more about clockwork that any other in Gearwyk. "Who will mind my tinkery?" Cogswell complained. "Since my good-for-nothing apprentice Rur ran off, I'm dreadfully short-handed."

"Well, if you hadn't whacked him on the noggin with a spanner quite so much, he mightn't have run away," the Turk told him. Cogswell grumbled, but agreed to lock his tinkery and join the dragon hunters, for he was an old friend and rival of the Turk, and was both unwilling to let him face danger alone, and unwilling to yield him all the glory if the dragon hunt were successful.

Next the Mayor picked the Gypsy Fortune Teller who sat in a glass booth all day and read her cards, then the Dancing Prussian Grenadier and his lady partner, and finally a troop of tin soldiers. "Bring out the Mechanical Bishop!" said the Mayor. "Let him bless our mission." Alas, the Bishop's sermons were recorded on wax gramophone cylinders, which had all been melted by the heat of the dragon's breath as she swooped over his chapel. But the Turk had a sudden fancy, and Cogswell did a quick surgery on the Bishop's mechanism, and before long they had rigged him to use player piano rolls instead, so that when his steel jaw moved up and down, rink-a-tink ragtime music issued from his mouth instead of dolorous Johnsonian periods. An improvement, some of his listeners whispered to each other out of the Bishop's hearing.

"Have you consulted the gods about the success of our undertaking?" Cogswell asked the Bishop when he was done.

The Bishop nodded. "I have prayed to Horologus, god of Mainsprings, and Embrocatia, Goddess of Lubrication," he said.

"And?"

"They said they'd get back to me."

Cogswell's head spun around, and his enameled tin eyebrows flapped up and down like birds' wings, as they did when he was in deep thought. "I cannot but think that this augurs poorly," he said. "Fortune Teller, read your cards for us regarding the outcome of our mission."

The Gypsy Fortune Teller's chipped porcelain hand flipped her cards back and forth, a blur of kings, swords, knights and cups. Presently a slip of paper fluttered from a brass slot in the front of her booth. It read: Amor vincit omnia.

"A noble sentiment, although its relevance to our task is obscure," said the Turk. "Onward, then. Follow that dragon!"

And so the dragon hunting party sallied forth. It was noted that the dragon appeared over the western horizon when she came to terrorize Gearwyk, and departed in the same direction when she was done, so it was to the West they traveled in search of her lair. For days the party marched over hills of whimsically painted porcelain, through fields of aluminum wheat and brazen corn, through the passes of the rugged Cast-Iron Mountains, where behemothic cantilevers and trusses of black iron towered over the trail and at night the wind whistled through the web of steel cables that held the arching crags suspended. They passed through scores of towns, from tiny hamlets to populous cities, and everywhere the clockwork citizens cheered them on and lined the streets to watch the company pass, mechanical flautists playing their tunes, wind-up monkeys beating their drums.

Evenings, when the sun's brass globe fell beneath the horizon, the company made camp under pavilions of silk and cloth-of-gold. The Prussian Grenadier and his lady waltzed to the strains of the tin soldiers' band, firelight glowing on their androgynous bisque faces, the while the Turk and Wheelhart Cogswell plotted the dragon's downfall.

"I vote for pouring salt water on it," said the Turk one night as he turned Cogswell's key, winding up his companion's mainspring for the next day's journey. "It will rust the working parts, and freeze the dragon immobile. We may then unbolt its head in perfect safety and bear it back to Gearwyk, where it will make a splendid war trophy."

"But what if its mechanism is not made of a corruptible metal?" said Cogswell. "Suppose its clockwork is of brass, nickel, or stainless steel? Instead, I favor trying to set it afire. In order to fly, it must be light, and it is my thought that its skin, scales, and structural parts may be of a flammable metal such as magnesium or beryllium. With the right igniting compound, we could set the entire dragon ablaze."

"Either stratagem requires us to approach the dragon closely," said the Turk. "And this may be their weakness, for if she sees us coming with a vat of salt water, or a drum of permanganate of potash and a carboy of glycerin, the game is up. Fortune Teller, what say you? What are the chances of our plans succeeding?"

The Gypsy Fortune Teller flipped her cards back and forth, the pleasant whir of gears spinning issued from within her glass case, and a slip of paper appeared from the brass slot. "'Buy the sun, moon, and stars. Borrow the money from friends.'," the Turk read. "Hrm. I'm not sure this helps us, although it was doubtless well meant."

At last they came to land's end, and the shores of the Quicksilver Sea stretching westward to the horizon. The company hired a captain and his ship, but dangerous was the passage they made across that ocean of mercury, where tide and wind whipped the waves into towering silvery breakers that crashed down upon the ship's deck, scattering shining droplets everywhere. Thunderstorms of bromine rain and hailstones of antimony and bismuth beset them. Every night the battered silver moon rose from the east on its titanic planetary gears and the sea glittered with its light. Robot dolphins paced the ship, churning the mercurial tide with their tails, their voices like pealing bells.

Six days from port, a glittering island of rock crystal appeared on the western horizon, and that evening, when the company saw the dragon cross the sky from the east and land there, they knew they had found their quarry, and the battle they sought was about to be joined.

The dragon hunters made camp on a beach of crushed rose quartz. Inland, a dense tropical forest of green enameled steel palm trees and vines of wire and twisted cable invested the island, and climbed the sides of its central peak of glistening rock crystal. Near evening the dragon returned, from out of the east, her silhouette reflected in the mercurial waves. Cogswell bid the others to hide, and awaited the dragon alone.

She spotted him. The dragon gave forth a great roar like a foghorn, and stooped on him. Cogswell waited. Closer she plummeted. When she was almost upon him, he ran into the silvery surf until his head was almost covered. The dragon opened her great maw, and hot was her fiery breath on him! But the mercurial waves in which he was immersed absorbed the heat of her breath, and left him unharmed. Her great webbed wings buffeted his face as she skimmed low over the surface of the sea, then climbed steeply again. And as she climbed, Cogswell had a brief glimpse of her back, and saw what he needed to see. "Ah-ha!" he thought. He let his metal body sink to the rocky bottom, and lay there hidden beneath the waves for several hours, until he was certain the dragon had departed.

That night he revealed his plan to the others. Meanwhile, the tin soldiers had gone exploring and had discovered the dragon's cave, high among the rock crystal hills. The following morning the Turk was the first to climb through the jungle to the cave entrance.

"Mademoiselle Dragon," he cried. "I have come to challenge you!"

The clockwork dragon thrust her head into the light. It was twice as tall as the Turk's whole body. Her eyes, yellow agate, crystal and onyx, regarded him from immeasurable depths of knowledge and cunning. Her scales were articulated beryllium edged with gold, flashing in the morning sun with every movement of her head. "Ah, one of the cruel and ungrateful fools from Gearwyk," the clockwork dragon said.

"I do not know what you mean by that," the Turk replied, "but I have come to challenge you at chess. I hear dragons are unsurpassed in intellect throughout all the worlds. I will play you three games. If I win two of the three, you must promise to leave Gearwyk unmolested forever. If you win -- "

"Done," said the dragon, before the Turk could finish his challenge. He shrugged. Although dragons have subtle minds, especially dragons of clockwork, when it comes to chess none can match the Turk, indisputably the greatest chess master in the Clockwork World, and perhaps the greatest in all the Worlds of Contingency that tumble like a waterfall of glistening bubbles through probability space, endlessly growing and shrinking, dividing and joining, spawning and dying, like the waters of Robert Southey's Cataract of Lodore. The Turk had little trouble winning two games quickly.

"And now that I have fulfilled my end of the bargain," the Turk said, packing up his chess pieces, "I trust that you will forever leave Gearwyk in peace."

"You trust in vain," said the clockwork dragon. "Have you never heard of the legendary duplicity of dragons? I shall do as I please with Gearwyk. Now leave me, silly tin thing, before I melt you to slag." Hearing that, the Turk took off running down the mountain, but even so, the dragon's fiery breath behind him singed his ermine-trimmed silk robes.

Next to challenge the dragon was the Gypsy Fortune Teller, her glass-enclosed booth borne on a litter by two tin soldiers. "I have come to tell your fortune, which will doubtless be dismal and depressing, thus breaking your morale," she announced.

"By all means do your worst," said the dragon.

The Fortune Teller's head bobbed. Fwish, fwish! went her hand over her cards. A fortune slip popped out of the brass slot. "'Though a sparrow may fall in love with a lioness, he can never wed her,'" read the dragon. "Quite true. But my morale remains unbroken."

Fwish, fwish! went the Gypsy Fortune Teller's hand again. Out popped the fortune. "'Better to be a happy jongleur than a despairing prince,'" read the dragon. "This is excellent stuff you are producing, Madam Fortune Teller, but it is failing to injure my morale in the slightest."

"I don't understand what's wrong," the Gypsy Fortune Teller said. "Let me try one more time." Again she riffled through her cards, and a final fortune appeared at the brass slot. The dragon read it: "'All Tragedies are finished by a death, all Comedies are ended by a marriage.' I'm not much for literary criticism, but I'll take your word for it. And now, off with you!" With that, the tin soldiers hurried down the mount with the Gypsy Fortune Teller and her booth.

Finally the dancing Prussian Grenadier and his lady approached. The tin soldiers' band struck up a minuet. The Prussian Grenadier bowed to the dragon, and gestured. "What's this?" the dragon said. "Are you two asking me to dance with you? You have no voices because your pretty faces are fired bisque, and incapable of speech, but I will try to understand your movements. Be careful lest I step on you, for you are small, and I am large." And thus the dragon and the Prussian Grenadier and his lady danced the minuet together, which actually didn't work very well because the dragon was fifty times taller than the other two, and lacked a partner (which one must have in a minuet), but all the participants did the best they could under the circumstances. The dragon's enthusiastic footfalls upon the ground caused the entire island to shake and the Prussian Grenadier and his partner to bounce up in the air considerably, but eventually the dance was concluded. "Farewell, farewell," said the dragon when they were done, waving her forefoot at them. "I thank you for that pleasant diversion. Sadly, in the morning I intend to destroy you all. Until then, I wish you a pleasant evening and a restful night."

"Any luck?" Cogswell asked the Turk and the Gypsy Fortune Teller when they had gathered at their encampment on the beach that evening. Both shook their heads. "No matter," said Cogswell. "Our diversionary tactics served their purpose. With the dragon distracted, I was able to slip into her cave and retrieve -- this."

He brought his plunder forth: a stout steel wind-up key as tall as Cogswell himself, its shaft nearly a foot across, with a square hole in the end to fit the dragon's winding stem. That was what Cogswell had spotted on the dragon day before, the circular keyway and the telltale square peg within it. "Our dragon problem is at an end," Cogswell said with satisfaction. He marched down to the edge of the Quicksilver Sea, and heaved the key as far as he could into the waves. With a tremendous splash it disappeared beneath the silvery foam. "If she is wound, she may fly one more time," Cogswell told the company, "but once her mainspring has run down, that will be her finish."

"Still," said the Turk, folding his porcelain arms beneath his silk robes, "I think there may be one thing we are forgetting."

"Which is?" Cogswell asked.

"Well, you see, it's forgotten, that's why I can't tell you."

"You are infuriating!"

"If it comes to me, I'll let you know," promised the Turk.

The following morning dawned fair. The expeditionary members gave each other's keys a final wind-up, and waited expectantly for the appearance of the dragon. And soon enough there she came, her million metallic scales glittering in the morning sunlight as she came sailing over the enameled steel palms, her yellow gaze seeking out the dragon hunters. "Be brave," Cogswell cautioned them. "She has only this flight left in her, then she is done for."

"But who is that riding on her back?" asked the Gypsy Fortune Teller.

"Rur!" shouted Cogswell. "What are you doing here, you worthless pail of broken-toothed gears?"

"Obviously, he is riding the dragon," the Turk suggested. "And he appears to be controlling it. By the way, it just occurred to me what we were forgetting: if the dragon had a wind-up key, there must be someone else in the wings to wind her up."

"A lot of help that is now," Cogswell said. "But no matter. The dragon will still run down presently, Rur or no Rur. Give it up, Rur!" he shouted into the sky. "I do not know how a rattling case of broken ratchets and worn pawls such as yourself, of negligible intelligence or mechanical aptitude, managed to capture and control a clockwork dragon, but your spree of brigandage is over. Your dragon will shortly run down her mainspring, and fall from the sky."

"Nay," cried Rur from high above. "Capture? I did not capture this dragon, you chattering heap of corroded tin! I made it! I created it! It is my masterwork, you worn-out old fool! It is my revenge on you, and Gearwyk, for your sorry treatment of me. And last night, when I discovered your perfidy, rather than make a new key, do you know what I did? I made her self-winding! My dragon will now run forever!"

"Now this is a truly disturbing turn of events, if you will pardon the expression," said the Turk. "Perhaps Rur wasn't as stupid as you thought, Cogswell. Or perhaps knocking him on the head with a wrench improved his intelligence. Now there's a novel idea. Here, let me whack you around a bit, maybe it will make you smarter."

"Self-winding?" said the dragon. "Then I have no need of you, little mechanical man. I shall go my own way in freedom, dragons being notoriously selfish." And saying that she bucked her immense frame with such violence that Rur was thrown off, his body spinning helplessly high into the sky, only to fall onto the crystalline rocks hundreds of feet below with a crash and a rattle. Away flew the dragon down the sky. Cogswell and the others hurried to where poor Rur had fallen.

Rur's body lay scattered in parts upon the rocks, smashed cogs and gears, bent pistons and snapped connecting rods protruding in a jumble from his broken limbs and torso. Cogswell knelt and cradled Rur's head and battered chest in his arms. "Rur, Rur," he exclaimed, "what a sad and pitiful end you have come to. Oh, Rur, I am truly sorry for my poor treatment of you, and the crimes it led you to. Rur," he vowed, "I will rebuild you. I will carry you back to Gearwyk, and make you new, beautiful and functional again."

But Rur would have none of it. "Part me out," he mumbled through dented lips. "I do not wish to live. The clockwork dragon was my life's work. I loved her, but she has betrayed me. I oiled her and polished her scales and lovingly wound her mainspring every day, but still she cast me off to die. Only a dragon can love a dragon. Strip me down for parts, eradicate me utterly, for never a sadder or more inconsolable clockwork has there been than poor Rur." And with those words, his mainspring ratchet gave way, and the mainspring uncoiled itself within his chest with a horrid hammering and clanking, his form became still, and his metal lips moved no more.

A sorrowful Cogswell gathered up Rur's parts, packed them into a trunk, and he and the others returned to their ship, and thence over the Quicksilver Sea, and took their long journey home again. It was a journey that gave Cogswell much time to cogitate. Arriving back in Gearwyk, the dragon hunters were informed that the problem of the clockwork dragon had only widened: now that Rur was no longer focusing the dragon's destructive whimsies on Gearwyk, she was troubling towns all over the Clockwork earth. Something must be done, the townspeople said.

Shortly thereafter rumors began to circulate about a device Wheelhart Cogswell was building. The Turk came round to Cogswell's tinkery one day to investigate. "Why, my goodness," he said, after Cogswell let him into his workshop. "It looks like an egg. With a wind-up key in it."

An egg it was, sitting on Cogswell's workbench, but such an egg as Gearwyk had never seen, a clockwork Faberge egg, its machinery within purring and ticking and tocking, but decorated on its shell in the most fantastic and baroque manner, with jewels and precious metals, graceful carvings of acanthus and gilded putti, painted panels depicting clockwork lovers and fanciful clockwork beasts -- a remarkable device to behold. It more than filled the workbench it sat on, it must have been a yard long and half that in its smaller axis. "A fit egg to hatch the most noble of beasts," said the Turk. Cogswell only grunted.

When the Turk visited the following week, the egg had doubled in size. Cogswell explained he had been adding to it. By the following week it had doubled again, and Cogswell had started construction on a huge tent adjoining his tinkery to house it. Week by week, the egg grew larger within that tent, as Cogswell furiously added parts to it. The sound of its inner machinery could be heard blocks away, and some of the clockwork folk claimed they could detect in that mathematical music a note of sadness, wistfulness, and longing. On a day when the egg had almost outgrown its enclosure, Cogswell ordered for the tent to be struck.

The egg glittered in the sun, towering above the heads of the gathered clockwork folk. A sparkle of light on the horizon heralded the approach of the clockwork dragon. Within the egg, the sounds of machinery increased, and the spectators drew back in alarm. In slow motion, the shell of the egg split to reveal its contents: a coiled vermiform body clothed in silvery scales, with immense bat-like wings, tiny legs, and a head like a Chinese Fu dog. "You who were in your past life the apprentice Rur, I now dub thee 'Roar', the dragon!" cried Cogswell. Roar lifted his head, bellowed, and jets of steam hissed from his nostrils. He looked up, and his gaze locked on the clockwork dragon in the sky. With a deafening clanking and banging Roar's form uncoiled, his wings beat, knocking over half the crowd of clockwork folk, and he sprang into the sky, his pinions propelling him upward, straight towards the approaching dragon.

"So," said, the Turk, picking himself up and beating the dust out of his robes, "you are fighting fire with fire, eh? You have created Gearwyk's own clockwork dragon to battle for us against the other? What a clever clockwork you are, Cogswell!"

"Um," said Cogswell.

High above them, the two clockwork dragons smashed together with a clangor that shook the ground and struck sparks. The Turk shielded his eyes. "Are they fighting?" he asked.

"Um," Cogswell repeated.

"I think they're fighting. Is that the way dragons fight?"

"Um..."

"You know," said the Turk after a minute, "I don't think that's fighting."

"No, it isn't," said Cogswell.

"Well," said the Turk. "Well. Impressive, I call that. Damnedest thing I've ever seen. I'll just run tell the mayor to ring the curfew, and maybe the children will stay indoors. I know it's healthy and natural and all, but, still. You know. Public morals and whatnot."

Two titanic clockwork dragons ramping across the sky in flagrante delicto, their clangs and bangs louder than church bells, the occasional scale of magnesium or beryllium loosened by the vigor of their ardor drifting down to the earth, was perhaps not the most edifying sight for the impressionable minds of the clockwork children, but it signaled the end of the clockwork dragon crisis. As Cogswell had anticipated, the delights of love proved more inviting than wanton destruction. Both dragons disappeared from the skies, and likewise passed out of the thoughts of the clockwork folk.

That is, until Cogswell sauntered out into his garden one morning some months later to find a whole clutch of clockwork eggs, jeweled and gilded and painted, each with its own steel key, gently tick-tocking, and promising the pitter-patter (or perhaps clankety-clank) of little clockwork dragon feet to come.

The End

Story copyright John Schoffstall, published by the Fortean Bureau
http://www.forteanbureau.com