Wind gusted the scent of the North Sea, twinned tangs of salt and wrack, across the square. Jax knew his kin felt the same wistful thrill he did, the anxious longing instilled by tales of the folkloric Queen Mab and her ragtag band of Lost Boys, living in their winter palace of Neverland mechanicals had secretly traded those fables for centuries. The mechanicals in attendance did not fidget. What an awful thing if it were true-so said the nervous fidgeting of the human crowd. Still … it was hard to resist the scandalous thrill of the tales of secret locksmiths and broken geasa and slaves with the temerity to pick the locks on their own souls. Rogue Clakkers were a fairy tale mothers told to frighten disobedient children, and a legend their slaves told to comfort each other in the quiet hours of the night while their bone-and-meat masters slept and wept and made other uses of their flesh. No mechanical in the city would willingly miss this. Rumor had it that in addition to a quartet of Papist spies, the doomed accused also included a rogue Clakker. Mechanicals like Jax, who detoured through the Binnenhof while running an errand for his human masters. The drizzle sounded a quiet counterpoint to the ceaseless clanking and clacking of the mechanical men who ever trotted to and fro on the Empire's business.

It whispered beneath the shuffling agitation of the human crowd and, as always here in The Hague, the quiet tick-ticktocking of clockwork servitors standing to attend the more well-heeled citizens. The rain pattered softly on umbrellas and awnings, trickled beneath silken collars, licked at the mosaicked paving tiles of Huygens Square, and played a soft tattoo - ping, ping, ting - from the brassy carapaces of the Clakkers standing in perfect mechanical unity atop the scaffold. It was the first public execution in several years, and thus, despite the cold drizzle, a rather unwieldy crowd thronged the open spaces of the Binnenhof.

The Mechanical by Ian Tregillis