CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness by Mike Allen Page A

grown of living trees woven tight together.
    Lost, she let the pedestrian tides carry her where they would, until her attention was arrested by the aromas of a pie seller’s stall. His wares were heated over a bed of coals in the iron belly of his spider-legged cart. Her stomach knotted painfully as she watched a man walk away with a steaming pastry. She sidled closer, wondering if she might snatch a pie and run.
    She noticed a boy staring at her, narrow-eyed and blunt nosed, a younger, leaner version of the pie seller. He tapped a leather cosh meaningfully against his thigh.
    Downcast, she retreated, and walked on.
    She passed a golden tree, growing in the centre of the thoroughfare. Beneath it, a trio of hook-beaked gargoyle men confronted a party of soldiers with axes. A gargoyle woman knelt between them, wailing and tearing at copper breastfeathers.
    The black tower loomed above the rooftops. She turned towards it. Her pulse quickened as she ascended the hill, a twinge of fear as she remembered the man she had injured the night before.

    Reaching the plaza, she saw that her anxiety was needless. A mob had gathered before the angel’s keep, demanding entry. Soldiers watched them, but made no move to intervene. No one had any attention to spare for her.
    She stopped beneath the petrified figure of her mate. His features were opaque with the sun behind him. She stretched up, but his outstretched hand was too high for her to reach. She pulled aside the briars that covered his foot and ran her fingertips over the shape of his toes. The stone was as ungiving as the severed hand she clutched against her belly.
    A loaded cart arrived, and people started piling wood for a bonfire. She cleared a nest among the briars, on the side of her mate’s plinth that faced the tower, then sank down and curled her limbs around the hollow misery of her belly.
    * * *
    She started from a torpid daydream, of her mate smiling, his stone visage turned to flesh, his fingers grasping hers.
    The minotaur looked down at her.
    She levered herself up, fumbling for her stone hand.
    Panic made her clumsy, and she dropped it in the briars at her feet. With a yelp, she bent to grab it.
    “Be still,” the minotaur said. “I’ll not hurt you.”
    She paused, warily, the stone hand half raised. He gazed at her in silence for a time, then his blue eyes shifted to look at the male statue.
    “How did this come to be?” he asked.
    She opened her mouth, struggling to shape a response. Although she understood him, like a small child, she lacked the skill to form words of her own. She pointed to the grand balcony.
    The minotaur gave a bovine snort and took her by the wrist. Dragging her along in his wake, he marched towards the tower.
    A few, braver or more angry than their fellows, still beat at the gate with mallets and staves. The blackened iron seemed to drink the sounds of their blows into itself. The hammerers fell back at the minotaur’s arrival. He raised his fist, muttering beneath his breath, then struck the door, three times. With each blow a boom like the striking of a gong echoed inside the tower.
    For a time, there was stillness. Then a postern cracked ajar within the surface of the gate and an Yng’finail head peered out. The man’s hair was yellowed with age and his skin a jaundiced orange. His pale eyes blinked and watered in the daylight.
    “We seek audience,” said the minotaur.
    The old man licked his lips. His eyes flickered to the minotaur’s companion, still caught by the wrist, and back again.
    “Forgive me, m’lord,” he said. “There’ll be no audience today.”
    He began to withdraw, but the minotaur raised a hand to stay him. “When?” he asked.
    The man started an answer, thought the better of it and stuttered to a halt. “I cannot say.”
    He shrank back as the minotaur leaned towards him. “If he is hurt, I might aid him.”
    The old man’s eyes went wide. He stepped back abruptly through the door and shut it