Mainspring by Jay Lake Read Free Book Online

strictly religious as a challenge to the brasswork of the heavens. Measuring God’s work was held by some to be a questioning of the divine.
    Still and all, life in New Haven had always seemed safely removed from the legendary realities of biblical tradition.
    Until Gabriel had come to Hethor’s room to lay a duty on him.
    So what did he believe? In God?
    Certainly.
    Proof of the divine was incontrovertible, found in every aspect of Creation. It was hard even for heretics to argue with a sky full of brass, of a design so evidently driven by keen intelligence and vast power.
    As for piety, well … Pryce Bodean was pious, and probably someday to be a leader of the church. Hethor had full example of what Pryce’s Christian compassion had bought.
    He sighed, closed his eyes, and listened to the sounds of the world. God, or Gabriel, would find him soon enough
if either of them wanted him. Le Roy’s mules fussed their way into Hethor’s uneasy daylight dreams.
    LUNCH WAS cold turkey. Hethor ate slowly. Hunger warred with a general malaise. Le Roy offered him corn liquor as well, which he refused with an uneasy lurch of the stomach. The old farmer munched and drank his way through their rest stop in a copse of alders as placidly as either of his mules, while Hethor tried not to think at all.
    The afternoon passed quickly enough. The wagon jarred Hethor out of his hangover in slow steps. Le Roy had nothing to say, which suited Hethor just fine, until they rolled into Storrs in the evening starlight. White clapboard buildings gleamed among towering elms that bordered streets as well cobbled as any New Haven boulevard. Storrs was a city that carried itself with pride.
    Le Roy clucked the mules to a halt just outside the town center, laid down the reins, and shifted in his seat to face Hethor. “You sure you’re set on a-seein’ the viceroy in Boston, boy?”
    â€œYes, sir.” Was Le Roy about to run him off?
    â€œThey’s a certain cut of man welcome at court in Boston. You got the city about you, boy, but still and all you ain’t their kind.”
    He hadn’t been their kind in New Haven, either. Faubus had known no better, but Pryce … well, Pryce was a different matter.
    Le Roy cleared his throat. “They’s folks there who judge a man by his shoes afore they ever look to see if he’s got truth in his eyes. Old Mudge, he saw truth in your eyes, boy, but in Boston they ain’t going to get past the mud on your boots.”
    â€œI am who I am,” said Hethor. The archangel Gabriel had granted him a mission, perhaps the most important mission in Northern Earth. He had to keep moving. “I’ve only got my story to tell.”

    Le Roy’s voice was suddenly thick, driven by passion, or perhaps anger. “Mudge bade me tell you this, for the sake of the white bird and them what set you on this road: If you give up on the viceroy, there’s a man drinks at Anthony’s on Pier Four in Boston when he’s in port. Goes by name of Malgus. Might tell your story to him, boy. He might even listen. And now, off with you.”
    Hethor hopped down from the wagon’s bench seat. “I thought you were to send me on to Boston,” he said uncertainly.
    â€œAnd if you wait here, I shall.” The old farmer was just a silhouette now, looming above Hethor as the sweat-stinking mules chuffed in the darkness. “Someone will be along presently to take you further. Won’t do to show you around the livery where I’m headed right now. Farewell, boy.”
    As Le Roy drove away, Hethor realized he’d never given the old man his name, nor as far as he knew had Mudge done so. It felt strange to hide who he was from someone who had shown him kindness. Hethor’s life had never been about fear before.
    Had it become so now?
    He was not sorry that the archangel Gabriel had chosen him, but this was a hard road. In a few short days his