The Library Machine (The Extraordinary Journeys of Clockwork Charlie) Read online

  ALSO BY DAVE BUTLER

  The Kidnap Plot

  The Giant’s Seat

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Dave Butler

  Cover art copyright © 2018 by Ken Pak

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780553513035 (trade) — ISBN 9780553513042 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780553513059

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Dave Butler

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One: The Spirit Stone

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part Two: The Souk of Wonders

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part Three: The Infidel Prince

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Part Four: The Demon Pit

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Part Five: The Cog City

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  About the Author

  Title Page

  FOR SUNITHA AND DAVID GILL

  “You knock, Ollie,” Charlie said. “I need my hands to hold the divining rod.”

  The divining rod was a length of metal wire with his brother Thomas’s scarf wrapped around it. It had been enchanted by the dwarf dowser Thassia, so it indicated the direction of Thomas. Charlie and his friends had used the rod to follow Thomas across the North Sea (stowed away in crates in the hold of a cargo ship) and western Germany (mostly on foot, but once in the back of a hay wagon) to a town called Marburg (according to a sign at the edge of town). All the people calling out across the boulevard on which they stood, or chatting to each other as they strolled beneath green trees, were speaking a language Charlie didn’t understand.

  German, probably.

  Ollie raised an arm to rap on the door, but hesitated. “Only what if they don’t speak English?”

  Charlie and his friends stood beside a neat house, three stories tall. The house sheltered in a green garden, lovely with ordered shrubs and rows of vegetables. To one side rose a retaining wall of enormous stone slabs propping up the side of the mountain. Above the wall climbed tier upon tier of wood-and-plaster houses, and at the top Charlie saw the spires of a castle, built of orange stone. On a second side of the house and its garden loomed a squared-off, high-gabled stone building with tall, peaked windows and multiple rooftops. Its door was tiny and shut, but the building was sunk into the side of the mountain, so perhaps it had other doors, higher up. To the third side was the boulevard, paved with bitumen concrete and trafficked by steam-puffing carriages.

  On the fourth side stood a building of astonishing beauty. A cupola rising above its center showed eight circular windows, each with the stained-glass image of a six-pointed star; another six-pointed star jutted from a metal rod above the cupola, like a weather vane. The main body of the building beneath the cupola bore further six-sided stars in stained-glass windows, and had a rooftop that rose and fell in a symmetrical pattern that created a shape like a star with eight sides. Broad steps climbed from the pavement in front of the building up to its main entrance, a grand set of recessed double doors.

  “Someone better knock, boyo,” Lloyd Shankin said. “I’ve an uncomfortable feeling on me, and it’s got something to do with that big machine.”

  The Welsh dewin—the word meant “wizard,” and like other Welsh wizards, Lloyd Shankin sang all his spells—nodded down the street past the large building. Entering town along the same boulevard Charlie and his friends had traveled came something that looked like two gigantic gearwheels, rolling forward and holding suspended between them a metal carriage. The machine reminded Charlie uncomfortably of the London Eye, the gigantic leisure wheel where his bap had died.

  And it had a skull and crossbones painted on the side.

  “I’ll do it.” Heaven-Bound Bob’s grin was as wide as her face. “I’m accoutered to people misunderstanding me.”

  “Accustomed, Bob,” Ollie said.

  Bob shrugged and knocked on the wood, worn smooth with age. Dark timbers framed the walls of the house, which were plastered white. A lamp hung on each side of the door, and the two stories above the ground floor each jutted slightly out, supported on more dark timbers, creating a sheltered porch on which Charlie and the two chimney sweeps stood.

  Lloyd Shankin, who was taller, stood on the walk behind them. Natalie de Minimis, the fairy warrior and rightful heir to the throne of the pixie realm of Underthames, hovered beside him.

  From inside the house came the steady rum-pum-pum of percussion instruments, and strings being played over them.

  Charlie lowered the rod, tried to make it look inconspicuous. Too bad it was a wire; a length of wood might have looked like a walking stick. Instead Charlie appeared to be carrying a bent rapier, or a fire poker.

  But the dowsing rod had definitely pointed at this house. He’d walked around it three times to be sure, and the rod continually tugged at the earth when pointed at the house. And, specifically, at one of the upper stories.

  Thomas was inside; there could be no doubt.

  The string instruments stopped, though the drums continued.

  A man with trimmed facial hair and a small round cap answered the door holding a violin and its bow in one hand. He gave a similar impression to the house: his waistcoat was elegant, but worn like the dark timbers, and although his shirtsleeves were white, a couple of the buttons loo
ked slightly mismatched. His beard was dark, but streaked with hints of gray. White tassels hung down beneath his waistcoat in a neat fringe.

  “Guten Tag!” His eyes twinkled merrily, and his voice boomed. Charlie thought Guten Tag must mean “good day” or “hello” in German; he’d never heard anyone say good day and sound so much like they meant it.

  “ ’Ere now.” Bob stuck her hands in the pockets of her peacoat and smiled. “Any chance you speak English?”

  “But of course!” the violinist cried.

  “Ain’t no of course about it.” Ollie grimaced and dug at the wood of the porch with his boot.

  “Are you not German?” Charlie asked.

  The man laughed, then looked thoughtful. “That may turn out to be a very good question.” He brightened. “But England, I love England! I’m a Cambridge man myself.”

  “A toff.” Ollie frowned.

  “A toff can be an excellent chap, my china,” Bob chided her friend.

  Ollie snorted.

  “Excuse me.” Lloyd Shankin removed his broad-brimmed black hat from his head and pressed it to his chest; this made him look less like a scarecrow and more like an undertaker, dressed in black and pale from working indoors. “Are you a rabbi?”

  “I am!” The violinist’s answer burst from him with a joyous smile. “Levi Rosenbaum, at your service.”

  “Lloyd Shankin.” One of the dewin’s eyes swiveled around as if he were trying to look at his own ear.

  “What’s a rabbi, then?” Ollie asked.

  “Like a preacher, or a priest. A Jewish one.” Charlie’s own knowledge of rabbis came strictly from books, but he wanted to show Rabbi Rosenbaum he wasn’t totally ignorant. “Sort of like Lloyd.”

  “Like Lloyd.” Ollie nodded. “That might be all right, then.”

  Rosenbaum and Lloyd Shankin both looked up the boulevard at the cog-wheeled machine grinding its way in their direction. The teeth of its wheels tore up stone as they dragged their way forward, and when a wheel drifted to one side or the other, it shattered trees and smaller carriages in its path.

  “Please come inside.” Rabbi Rosenbaum stepped back as an inviting smell of fish, furniture polish, and citrus drifted out the door.

  The chimney sweeps Bob and Ollie scooted in first, followed by Charlie and Gnat, and Lloyd at the rear. Charlie limped, as he had ever since Bob had opened his chest under Waterloo Station and accidentally bent one of the pins in his mechanism. “Is that your synagogue?” the Welshman asked.

  “It isn’t mine,” Levi Rosenbaum protested. “But it’s ours, yes. Gorgeous, isn’t it?”

  “I would love to see the inside,” Lloyd said. “See the stained-glass windows with light shining through them.”

  “I’ll give you a tour,” the rabbi said. He stepped into a parlor to one side of the entry hall, moving around a cello propped on its stand and a gramophone that cranked out a steady waltz-time stream of drum and tuba. With the violin bow he eased aside white drapes to look out toward the boulevard. “Why don’t we let these gentlemen pass by first? They don’t seem like university types, do they?”

  “University?” Lloyd asked.

  “The tall building with all the roofs,” the rabbi explained. “It’s a very old university, with a very famous library. Which is not to say that a person driving a war machine might not be interested in reading books, but, well…those men seem intent on something else.”

  “Who were you playing with?” Lloyd pointed at the cello. “I thought I heard two players.”

  “My daughter, Rachel,” Rosenbaum said. “She’s somewhere about. Now she’s one to have immediately gone and buried her nose in a book. She likes to know the details, that girl.” He raised his voice to call her. “Rachel!”

  A dark wood stairway led up within the entry hall. Charlie had put his foot on the bottom step—it was sneaky of him, and rude, but Thomas had to be upstairs—when Ollie hissed to get Charlie’s attention.

  He turned to look. The sweeps stood in a library on the opposite side of the entry hall from the parlor. Shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling and groaned with the weight of the books standing on them. Most of the titles were gibberish to Charlie, and many of the characters on the spines weren’t even the letters Charlie knew.

  But Ollie pointed insistently at a specific book, so Charlie stepped closer to look. When he read the spine, he stopped.

  The gold letters stamped into the cover identified the book’s title as Almanack of the Elder Folk and Arcana of Britain and Northern Ireland and its author as St. John Smythson, but there was something wrong with the volume. Despite the familiarity of the title, the book had a green cover, rather than the red Charlie knew. And it was too big.

  Too big by half.

  It must be the first edition. This was the book Grim Grumblesson and his fellow trolls had suppressed after publication, the book that had information so sensitive that the hulders hadn’t wanted anyone to read it.

  And here was a copy, sitting in a rabbi’s library in Germany. Ollie dragged the big volume off its shelf.

  Charlie looked back to the parlor. Lloyd and the rabbi were facing away from Charlie, toward the window, and their voices dropped as if they were discussing something that made them feel concerned.

  “Those aren’t the landgrave’s men,” the rabbi said.

  “What’s the landgrave?” the dewin asked.

  “The local ruler. The human ruler, at least. The hulders meet at their Thing and of course the fairies have the Undergraviate. Every folk rules itself, you see? A landgrave is like an earl, or a baron. His men wear all black, as does he. His heraldry is a red-and-white-striped lion; you’ll see that all over Marburg.”

  “Whose heraldry is a skull and crossbones?” Lloyd wondered. “They look like pirates.”

  The men were engrossed in their conversation.

  Charlie crept up the stairs.

  Gnat joined him, flitting ahead and then waiting on the landing. She still wore around her neck the tooth of the Hound of Cader Idris, a half-mechanical beast she’d defeated in single combat on the slopes of the Welsh mountain. “Have you tried the dowsing rod again?”

  By way of answer, Charlie raised the rod and rotated slowly in place. When it pointed at a closed door, the rod dipped. He swung it back to check the result and it dipped again.

  Thomas was on the other side of the door.

  Gnat nodded, and Charlie tried the brass doorknob. The door opened, and they slipped inside.

  Within, a simple wooden bed sat beside a small table with a crumpled black cloth lying on it. A few charcoal drawings hung on the walls, and the window to the outside looked up at the big building with peaked windows. The university, the rabbi had said. A shortish man with bright red hair that shot straight up rushed across the grass toward the university.

  Fleeing the rabbi’s house?

  Charlie thought he heard the short man sobbing.

  But there was no sign of Thomas.

  Gnat flitted down to look beneath the bed and shrugged.

  Charlie raised the rod and swept again—

  It dipped, indicating the table.

  “That can’t be right.” Charlie lifted the black cloth.

  Underneath it lay a pale hand. It was attached to nothing, and its wrist was ragged, as if it had been torn off by violence. Metal wires showed around the steel wrist bone.

  Charlie raised the dowsing rod over the severed member, and it dipped, touching the hand itself…and became abruptly inert.

  A girl’s voice spoke behind them, from the doorway. “What are you doing in here?”

  “What have you done with Thomas?”

  Charlie grabbed Thomas’s hand and whirled around. He raised the hand and pointed its finger at the newcomer like an accusation.

  She looked the same age
as Bob and Ollie and had long dark hair. Over a blue dress she wore a coarse brown apron that was spotted with dirt here and there and contained a garden trowel in its single large pocket. She held a musical bow, like the bow to a violin. Or a cello.

  “You shouldn’t have come up here uninvited.” The girl spoke English with only a little more of a German accent than her father. “That’s prying.”

  Charlie wanted to say something about how impressed and surprised he was at her English, but he was flustered. She was right, he was snooping. But she also had Thomas’s hand, and she didn’t want to talk about it. She was hiding something from him, and that made Charlie angry. He set the dowsing rod down on the table—it was useless now—but he wrapped Thomas’s scarf around his own neck. He waved Thomas’s hand. “Did that man take Thomas somewhere?”

  Rachel stepped to the window in time to see the red-haired person duck into a door in the university’s wall. “That’s just meneer doktor yon vie more. He didn’t take anybody anywhere.”

  “Doctor what?” Charlie asked.

  “Meneer Doktor is his title. That means ‘mister doctor,’ in English. The university people like to pile on lots of titles. Meneer Doktor is actually the short version. Yon, spelled J-A-N, that’s his given name, and his family name is spelled W-I-J-M-O-O-R. Jan Wijmoor.”

  “Oh.” Charlie felt slightly mollified. “Is he a professor at the university?”

  Rachel shook her head. “He’s an engineer. He maintains the Library Machine.”

  Charlie couldn’t get distracted. “And where’s my brother?”