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I. Eight
The metal pot is big and shiny, filled with warming water and placed over a burner in the kitchens of the great airship Castle Wulfenbach. Inside, the centerpiece of tonight’s dinner waves a pincer, languidly unaware of its fate. It is a big, blue-gray lobster, ordinary in every way except that it has been selected for the Baron’s repast tonight.
Two small hands dip in and out.
The metal pot is big and shiny, filled with warming water and placed over a burner in the kitchens of the great airship Castle Wulfenbach.
There is nothing else in it.
*
Gilgamesh lives in the Castle Wulfenbach dormitory with the other wards. He is eight years old with messy hair and big brown eyes and likes eating fried snails, stealing Sleipnir’s romance books to read at night, and exploring the castle with his best friend Tar— except he doesn’t, and Tarvek isn’t. Tarvek is a slippery, treacherous bastard who’s just as likely to stab you in the back as look at you, and he’s not even on the castle anymore, so what does it even matter.
Gil has spent his whole life listening to stories of everyone else’s illustrious relatives and wishing for a family tree just as exciting of his own, because on Castle Wulfenbach, lineage is important. And two weeks ago, all his dreams came true: the Baron himself! That’s as special as a secret pedigree can be. Except…it has to stay secret, so nothing has really changed. And...when he told Gil, the Baron also revealed Tarvek’s true nature.
Which is good. Definitely an advantage to be one step ahead of traitorous weasels who want to betray you. Definitely a positive thing to get them kicked out of your home.
So why does his stomach hollow and his throat swell every time he thinks about it?
But right now Gilgamesh’s mind isn’t on lineages, or fried snails, or Tarvek Sturmvoraus. All his attention is laser-focused on a smoke-filled chamber in the center of the messy laboratory that he’d broken into earlier tonight. His eyes are red and frenetic.
The chamber opens, and plumes of smoke billow out, revealing a small blue form when they clear. Bright, intelligent eyes peer at the boy.
“Hello,” Gil intones, his voice overlaid with the reverberations of madness.
A small eep issues from the chamber and with a few clacks the blue form huddles deeper inside and further away.
“Oh,” says Gil, his eyes clearing. He holds out his hands to the frightened form, his voice returning to normal. “Don’t be scared…I won’t hurt you.”
Click, click, click, and something bipedal, cyclops-eyed, and blue-shelled inches forward. It is recognizably the lobster from the kitchens.
“Hi,” Gil says shyly.
The lobster blinks. It has an eyelid.
“I’m Gil — Gilgamesh. I, um, made you…What’s your name?”
It only blinks at him again.
Gil waits. When nothing happens but the crustacean rustling its feet against the floor of the chamber, he withdraws his hands, disappointed. “Of course it won’t say, maybe it can’t talk, I’m so stupid—”
“…zoing?”
Gil stops mid-mutter. “Did you say zoing?”
The construct shuffles forward hesitantly. “Zoinggg.”
Gil’s face splits into a wide, wide grin. “That’s it! You’re called Zoing! Oh — I forgot.” He clears his throat and stands straight, projecting his voice: “I am your creator, and you will—”
“Pfff!”
“Hey! What do you mean, ‘pfff’?”
Zoing makes a recognizably rude noise, then scuttles out of the chamber to stand contemplatively in front of Gil, its single eye huge and its antennae gently waving.
“You’re right,” Gil says, relenting. “That servant-of-evil business isn’t fun, anyway.” He reaches down with his palm out. “Let’s be friends.”
Real friends. Not like…
The crustacean cocks its head. Then, instead of completing the handshake, it jumps up — up, impossibly high, as high as Gil’s head, and Gil catches it in his arms. Actual laughter, not Spark gloating, bursts out of him. “It’s good to meet you, Zoing!”
*
II. Nine
Gil’s seen a lot of Jägermonsters in his life, like the one who delivered the invitation and escorted him and Zoing into the lavishly appointed sitting room, but up close Mr. Khrizhan is easily the biggest Jäger he’s ever seen. They tower over him and Zoing like a fat, light-blocking pillar, one with green skin and white tusks.
“So,” he rumbles as they stare up at him, awed, “dis is de leetle shrimp boy.” He lowers his massive bulk to get a better look, still putting him a head above Gil and far above Zoing.
Zoing squeaks in alarm and scuttles back behind Gil, what’s visible of his shell gaining a healthy red sheen. The rest of him is covered in a pair of uneven, poorly-constructed, clearly handmade overalls.
“He’s not a shrimp,” Gil says angrily, even though the massive Jäger intimidates him too. “He’s Zoing.”
“Zo-een, is name?…Is nize to met you.” The squatting Jäger extends an enormous clawed hand.
The tug on Gil’s trouser leg is a steady, contemplative pressure.
“Don’t worry, Zoing. Mr. Kri — Khrizhan doesn’t eat intelligent constructs. And you’re pretty smart!”
The tug changes direction, and slowly Zoing edges out from behind Gil. His mouthpieces click as he first looks at the outstretched hand, then at his own pincer. With an air of curiosity he then nudges the pincer into the Jäger’s fleshy palm.
Khrizhan grips it with a roll of booming laughter. “Verry goot!” He peers even more closely at the captive Zoing, who begins to audibly shake, shelled limbs clacking against the floor. “Doz it talks?”
“Of course he—“ Gil starts, then stops himself. “He’s a he, not an it,” he adds in a more subdued voice.
“Gilmekkapants!” the beleagured arthropod finally squeals. “Goodgood pants!”
“Vell, perhaps I don’t eat you after all,” the Jäger says, letting go. The teeth in his smile are as long as sabers.
“Enough, Khrizhan. Ve invite young Holzfäller to sit.”
Two more hulking Jägers enter the room from a side door, and Gil starts to feel like shaking, too. One of the newcomers has fierce, shifty eyes and a full white beard, and the third is the biggest, with an impossibly wide grin lined from end to end with teeth as long as his hand and as narrow as needles. All three uniforms are as baroque as as the decor.
“Deese are Misters Zog and Goomblast,” Khrizhan rumbles. “Dey is my…associates.”
“How — how do you do.”
“…howyoudo.”
“Polite,” the one called Zog growls, without specifying whom. He settles himself in one of three cavernous armchairs arranged around an incongruously delicate-looking coffee table and gestures for Gil and Zoing to sit, so they plop down together onto a settée. The other two Jägers follow suit, with Goomblast setting down a tray with a porcelain teapot and five cups the size of his fingernail before he sinks down into the chintz.
“Iz drink from Londinium,” he says in a voice like pouring gravel. “Ve quite likes it. Only,” he sighs regretfully, with a gust of breath that blasts Gil’s hair back, “de appara-tus iz too small.”
“Everyting too small in Londinium,” grunts Khrizhan. “No space to stretch vun’s arms.”
“Oho,” says Goomblast, “everything is small except for—”
“Ve don’t invite dese fine young gentlemen here to tok about Londinium!” Zog interrupts. He turns a smile on Gil and Zoing, revealing just as many teeth as his compatriot. “Zo, vot hyu like to do, gentlemen?” He picks up a pitcher and begins to pour a steaming stream of water into the teapot.
“What…do we like to do?” Gil asks, bewildered, but Zoing readily answers, albeit in a small voice:
“Eatmekkapants.”
Gil’s ears grow red. “Well, you see, I spend most of my time in the lab that my — that Baron Wulfenbach lets me use. I thought Zoing might want clothes, so I made some for him, but I’ve been working on a better one, it’s going to be rocket-powered and temperature-controlled and have charging docks for death rays and…”
The hulking Jägers nod surprisingly politely as Gil describes his designs for the arthropod suit. Zog pours some clearish brown liquid out of the spout and hands cups to both Zoing and Gil, which Gil sips without paying much attention.
“…I’ve turned down the inhibitor, of course, but it’s still unstable, I might have to reverse the polarity too.”
“I am enterested in de eating,” Goomblast says.
“Oh, that. I steal — I mean, bring down — food from the mess hall for Zoing. He can’t — er — go down to the mess hall himself because, uh…”
“No need to explen, ve all constructs here!” The three of them laugh heartily, their combined hilarity causing the floor to tremble.
“Mister Zo-een can eat at de Jägers’ mess,” Khrizhan rumbles, and Zoing takes on a red sheen once more, his claws rattling against the porcelain cup and a saucer he’s picked up from somewhere. (It holds a singular sugar cube, but has evidence of having held more.) “Ve have more tea,” Khrizhan says slyly, tapping a massive nail against the pot.
“Tee…”
“Is that what this is?” Gil asks in surprise, looking down at his empty cup. It was bitter but slightly floral, and he feels warm all over and full of energy from the hot liquid.
“It keeps tings civilized,” Zog says, and the other two nod ponderously.
“Table gots all de legs.”
“Room still standing.”
“Hyumins not screming.”
All three of them nod in apparent satisfaction. Suddenly, a series of strident clangs sound from the other room, a harsh, discordant jangling, making Gil and Zoing both jump.
“Ah, myoo-zik hour,” Khrizhan says, smacking his lips. “From Paris, hyu know. Time for de young guests to go!”
Gil would very much like to stay for music hour, but he and Zoing find themselves firmly pushed out the door as a violin played like a saw joins the cacophony. Somehow the sounds get louder after the door is closed after them.
“Well, that was interesting!” Gil shouts over what sounds like a series of very loud raspberries, as they start back to the dungeon labs.
“Verrabig.”
“No kidding. I wonder what they wanted…” Gil looks down to see Zoing’s single eye on him, wide and shining and beseeching. “What — oh, you liked the tea?”
“…Mekkatee?”
“Oh, of course, a teapot shouldn’t be too hard to build. Though I wonder what mechanism it uses to make the water look and smell like that…”
“Zoing helpmake.”
“Of course.”
*
III. Twelve
“Zoing! This one is really good!” Gil sniffs at the teacup again, a delicate thing from a porcelain set he’d gotten from the last air market hosted on Castle Wulfenbach. His brow scrunches. “Is it one of the new ones?”
Zoing squeaks a response. Apparently it is a traditional variety from India that the kitchens have just acquired. Gil and Zoing are pretty adept at pilfering from the stocks now.
Zoing is dressed much more fashionably than before, in an ochre coat and round white hat in the style of the Polar Lords that Seffie — sorry, Lady Xerxsephnia — left on board not too long ago. The accompanying, now unclothed doll has been thrown into a cabinet in Gil’s lab marked “Use Later.”
As for the mechanical suit…
“We just need to find a girl.”
…The mechanical suit has evolved a little.
“Redhair, andmean?”
“Already gone home. Though she would have been a fantastic test subject.” Even if she was mad about not finding her doll. “Well, we’ll just have to go out and look for one. Can you get in yourself?”
Sounds of arthropod exertion comes from Gil’s companion as he clambers up what looks like a pile of junk.
“Left lever, right throttle,” Gil instructs once Zoing is seated on top of the pile.
“Knowit.”
“Alright, alright.”
The junk pile begins to rumble, vibrating as if to shake itself apart. As it’s rattling around, it suddenly unfolds, growing upwards on long, hinged legs. A torso appears, and bulky clawed arms stretch out from jointed metal shoulders. Zoing sits in a pilot’s pod on top of the whole thing.
The construct looks around. “Works! Bigtall.”
Gil claps his hands. ”Excellent!” He thinks. “Let’s go down to the mess hall. It should be empty right now, but there’ll still be people going in and out. Maybe one of them will be a girl.”
They sneak down the corridors. Or, Gil sneaks, and Zoing thumps beside him with all the subtlety of a giant, clanking arthropod suit. “We’ll add suspension and padding after this,” Gil mutters. Luckily, the hallways are not crowded at this time. Gil ducks out of sight when they pass a rare retainer — constructs and clanks are a common sight aboard Castle Wulfenbach, but the Baron has threatened Gil with dismemberment if his identity as a Spark is revealed.
They make it down to the mess hall, where Zoing hides poorly behind an indoor shrubbery and Gil hides behind Zoing(’s suit). “There’s one!” he hisses, as a red-headed girl in trousers breaches the entryway with her nose buried in a maintenance manual. “Sleipnir won’t mind…right?”
The pincers of the arthropod suit flex.
Sleipnir takes an agonizingly long time to cross half the room, but when she gets finally gets in front of them, Gil puts aside his reservations and whispers, “Now!”
The mechanical joints whir and clang, Sleipnir looks up from her book, and Zoing and Gil startle sheepishly. The suit triumphantly takes hold of the branches of the potted shrubbery and heaves it high into the air.
“Gil? What’re you doing? Is that your clank?”
“No — no! I was just — passing by. And saw this interesting contraption, heh, you know, I thought I’d take a look. It’s cool, isn’t it?”
“It’s…unique. Is it a gardening clank?”
“…Looks like it, doesn’t it?”
The ceramic pot holding the plant slowly releases its grip on its vegetal charge and clatters to the ground in a shower of soil. The newly liberated roots tremble a bit with the disturbance.
“It’s not very good,” Sleipnir observes.
“…It isn’t, is it.”
Sleipnir wrinkles her nose. “I’d love to get a better look at it when I have time, but Von Pinn wants me in the engine lab now. I’ll stop by if it’s still here later. See you, Holzfäller.”
“Notagorl,” Zoing comments sadly once Sleipnir is out of sight, regretful Cyclopean gaze on the captive shrubbery. The leaves shake slightly, as if in agreement.
*
Gil and Zoing have a furious, whispered argument over whether Von Pinn counts as a girl or not a week later, cut short when Von Pinn herself halts her stiletto boots not far from their hiding place and says ominously, “I know you’re there, Master…Holzfäller.”
They make a break for it.
*
Three days later, the Zoing and his suit unerringly snatch Gil from the middle of a crowd, cleanly and silently.
“It’s a proof of concept!” exclaims Gil.
*
He’s tightening the screws for the latest adjustment of the arthropod suit a few more days later when Zoing comes carrying the rachet wrench he’d requested, almost as big as Zoing himself. “Thanks!” Gil says, taking it.
“Sawahat,” Zoing says, by way of greeting.
“Oh?” says Gil absently, putting a bolt between his teeth. If he could just defibrillate the centralizer…
“Pointy. Orange. OnJäger.”
“You might have to fight the owner for it, then,” Gil says around the bolt.
Zoing makes a noise that can only be interpreted as crustacean contempt. “Yudone?” he asks curiously after a while, shuffling over to Gil.
Gil rubs his chin. “It’s close. I need to increase the osculation friction, but the new interlocking mechanism is pretty clever, if I do say so myself! You know, I almost wonder if…” His brain begins buzzing with possibilities, the whole world flying open and constricting all at once. He barely realizes that he’s sprinting over to a cabinet, which he throws open to reveal an incomplete engine, carelessly thrown in. “YES, it’s perfect for the flying machine.”
And so the arthropod suit sits forsaken in the corner, forgotten until some far-future day.
*
IV. Fourteen
“…And then the goldfish grows to a hundred times its original size and chomps!—” Gil makes an alligator movement with his arms— “the lobster.”
“Wow,” Theo says, mildly impressed as they come to an intersection in the corridors. “I have to go, though, I gotta do my rounds. Tell me the rest of it later.”
Gil himself starts heading down the route that leads to his lab, elated at having successfully imparted most of the plot of Trelawney Thorpe and the Welders of Destiny. A slight rattling startles him, and he looks down to see a familiar pointy, orange hat with lobstery antennae beneath it. “Oh, Zoing, why are you here? Shouldn’t you be in the lab?”
“Telltellyuyu do-done!” The construct is shivering for some reason, barely able to get the words out, but Gil’s immediately distracted by the message.
“The distillation is finished? That’s great news! Come on!” Grabbing one of Zoing’s claws, he sets off running.
*
V. Seventeen
Gil’s not running per se, but he is definitely walking at a very fast clip in his eagerness to get to the secret labs. Thank goodness he finished packing already; now he has time to finish that experiment before the Baron’s people start looking for him so they can bundle him onto the airship to Paris.
He opens the hatch to his lab and makes a beeline for the workbench, which houses the latest iteration of the disassembled heavier-than-air machine. “Zoing, bring me the coil stabilizer! It should be— er.”
A cart is trundling toward him, piled high with all manner of scientific equipment. A tea set rests on top of the heap in the spot of honor. It rolls to a rest in front of Gil, and Zoing peeks out from behind it, dwarfed three times over by the cart itself, and once again over by the mountain of stuff stacked past its sides.
“Allthis, foryoutakewith!”
Gil looks at the cart and begins laughing. “Zoing, if I brought all this, I’d need three more trunks!”
But the arthropod shakes his head surprisingly firmly. “Yuneed!”
Gil reaches out, taking care not to disturb the tea set, and extracts a cylinder with a crank from the pile. “Well, for example, this. It’s not like I’m going to be refining precipi…but I always meant to experiment with those extracted humors! I bet L’Université’ll have books on how to do that! Oh — a phrenological sympathizer. I think I can leave this…but what if I come across an abnormal specimen?”
“Toldyouneed.”
Gil scratches his head. “I guess I could request some extra trunks…” He looks down and is surprised to see Zoing gazing despondently up at him.
“Reallycan’tgo?”
Gil kneels down so he can look Zoing in the eye. Both of them have grown in the last nine years, but Gil has grown faster; it’s been a long while since Zoing has been able to jump straight into his arms.
“The Baron was clear you aren’t to come.” His fists clench and he scowls, remembering the first-ever fight he’d had with the imposing tyrant he occasionally calls Father. “Something about making it too difficult to hide my Spark. And meeting new friends.”
Gilgamesh. Another thing — the Sturmvoraus heir will attend L’Université this year as well. I trust you will be sufficiently vigilant against the machinations of that family.
“Newfriends…” Zoing’s antennae droop.
“Don’t worry,” Gil says fiercely. “Even if I make a hundred new friends, you’ll always be my first one.” Sturmvoraus doesn’t count. “And my best lab assistant!”
Zoing’s antennae don’t pick up.
“It’ll just be a few months, and then I’ll be here again for break. I’ll bring back new teas.”
The antennae quiver a bit.
“That’s right,” Gil encourages. “You know what, I bet there’ll be people from Londinium who know things about tea we haven’t even thought of.”
The antennae slowly lift. “Thinkso?”
Gil nods. “Of course! I’ll do my best to meet them.”
“…isgood,” Zoing says grudgingly. He casts his gaze back at the cart behind him. “Trunkforthis.”
“You’re right, you’re right.” Gil stands up. By the time he’s back from finding a Jäger and enduring a savage ribbing about the princely amount of luggage he’s taking, there is already a cup of light green tea waiting for him. Gil and Zoing sit straight down onto the floor amidst engine parts and paper diagrams, clink teacups, and sit drinking while they wait for the Jägers to bring trunks.
When the trunks come, Zoing fusses and makes sure the delicate equipment is packed correctly, the amount of padding he adds making the trunks overflow. Gil has to sit on the lids to get them to close.
But after they’ve relinquished the filled trunks to a posse of straining Jägers and it’s time to go, he finds there’s a lump in his throat and a burning in his eyes. “Well, see you later, I guess…”
He stands, then stoops back down again to hug Zoing fiercely. “I’ll be back before you know it. I promise.”
“Youbetta.”
Gil straightens up. “Okay, I’m ready,” he says to the remaining Jäger, ignoring the latter’s moist eyes and sappy grin.
The Jäger sweeps his arm forward and mock-bows. “Ov courze! Zees vay!”
*
VI. Eighteen.
Gil careens down the halls of the secret laboratory floor with a speed that definitely defies plausible deniability. When he bursts into the lab, a blur of orange and blue cannons toward him.
“Gilgameshback!”