Old Glue by Lamplight

Could two jagged shards of amber hold together under three atmospheres of steam, or had I turned my finest wide-angle lens into two useless yellow pebbles? Sitting cross-legged on the floorboards of The Gilded Moth with a blackened spirit lamp between my shins, I wiped cold condensation from the brass workbench and counted the minutes until dawn. Three miles behind us, the village of Omu-Adu was already bracing for artillery. Three miles ahead lay the border bridge. If I could not re-cement the scatter-prism and widen the projector's vapor baffle before morning light hit the towpath, the next troop of horsemen would find an ordinary wooden wagon with nowhere left to run.

Outside, in the willow-choked feeder cut, Kishi gave a soft, snorting cough against the wet bark. The mule knew better than to bray when damp reeds brushed her flank. She had spent five seasons hauling my stage gear between harvest fairs, and she recognized the smell of soldiers almost as well as I did: horses lathered in panic, burnt matchcord, and unwashed wool coats greased against river rain.

Inside the wagon, the air smelled of camphor, lamp alcohol, and damp cedar sawdust. Pipu sat motionless beside the tool drawer, his wound-down brass paws tucked under his tarnished chest. The runaway mainspring from our narrow escape had finally spent its fury. His little clockwork heart was entirely quiet now, though his jaw hung slightly agape, waiting for the crank-key.

"Patience, little copper-ears," I muttered under my breath. "One miracle at a time."

I lifted the two halves of the amber prism into the dim amber glow of the hooded spirit flame. The thermal shock from our phantom river illusion had sheared the lower bevel right along its natural crystal plane. The split was remarkably clean, but optical glass possessed no forgiveness. If the joined faces misaligned by even half the thickness of a moth's wing, the projector beam would scatter into blinding internal glare instead of casting a sharp river bank.

From the bottom of my repair chest, I retrieved a small stoneware jar sealed with green beeswax: mountain pine mastic mixed with boiled nut oil. Traveling puppet masters called it tree glass. When melted gently over low heat, it dried clear enough to fool the eye, but if boiled, tiny bubbles would turn the seam into a milky cloud.

I scraped a hazelnut-sized lump of dried resin into a brass ladle and held it two inches above the hooded flame. The resin softened slowly, weeping a clean, sharp scent of upland pine needles that temporarily drowned out the sour canal mud.

While the gum melted, I took a square of clean linen, dipped it in cane alcohol, and scoured both fracture faces. Any specks of soot or canal grit trapped inside the seam would fracture under heat the first time steam surged through the carriage. I held my breath, resting my forearms against the bench to steady my fingers.

"Hold still for me, Pipu," I whispered, reaching over to adjust the clockwork hound.

I swung Pipu's rigid, unwound brass tail upward and slid the handle of my watchmaker's magnifying loupe into the crook of his curled tail-spring. The tarnished brass tail gripped the brass stem firmly, serving as an unmoving third hand right above the work dish. It was an undignified task for a ferocious mechanical terrier, but the dead mainspring made him the steadiest clamp in the wagon.

"Good dog," I said, slipping a greasy mutton scrap into his brass jaws as a token fee.

The resin in the ladle thinned into liquid honey. Moving with deliberate speed before the autumn chill could congeal the glue, I lifted the hot ladle and let a single teardrop of molten mastic roll down the sheared fracture line.

The two pieces met. Warm resin squeezed along the seam, filling the microscopic fissures with liquid clarity. Peering through the mounted loupe, I pressed the two amber faces together, gently rocking the smaller bevel until the refractive index matched and the visible crack dissolved into a nearly transparent seam.

The glass cooled quickly in the drafty wagon. I wiped the excess gum from the edges with an alcohol-moistened scraper, then clamped the united prism between two soft leather pads.

The lens was whole again, but the repaired seam was an undeniable weak point. It could never endure the concentrated burst of high-pressure vapor I had unleashed against the cavalry patrol. To keep the hot seam from splitting open under tomorrow's steam, the projector needed a wider path for its breath.

I reached for my brass-handled jeweler's file and unscrewed the forward dispersion baffle from the projector's snout.

The baffle was a fluted brass funnel designed to choke steam into a narrow, focused jet. That narrow jet worked wonders when painting sharp silhouettes on distant bluffs, but high pressure meant violent heat spikes. If I wanted to create broad curtains of mist without blowing my mended prism into dust, the vapor needed to exit gently and spread across a wider arc.

Setting the brass funnel against the bench pin, I began to cut away the inner lip of the nozzle. The file whispered in rhythmic, even strokes: shk, shk, shk. Fine brass shavings drifted down onto the oilcloth like gold pollen.

With each pass of the file, I beveled the inner rim outward by fifteen degrees, opening three tiny secondary vents around the collar. The modification would lower the chamber's internal pressure by nearly a third, trading sheer projection range for a soft, rolling fan of fog. It was the difference between a blacksmith's bellows and the wide, cool breeze that rolls off the reeds at dusk.

When the collar sat flush, I used a pinch of fine emery dust to buff the filed brass smooth, blowing the filings out the small roof vent.

To test the alignment, I slid the mended amber prism back into the projector carriage, tightened the knurled brass screws until the leather washers groaned, and placed a tiny tallow candle behind the reflector.

The flame flared. Through the wide front lens, a clean, even fan of warm yellow light washed across the wagon's canvas wall. The glued seam showed only as a faint, translucent thread near the lower periphery, entirely lost within the broader wash of light.

I let out the breath I had been guarding in my chest. The Moth could cast a stage again.

A gray tint began to seep through the seams of the wooden roof slats. The darkness was thinning.

I snuffed the spirit lamp, stowed the tools in their felt-lined slots, and took the four-pronged key to Pipu's flank. Three deliberate turns brought the ratchet to life. The escapement began its steady, rhythmic ticking, and Pipu shook his brass ears with a rapid clatter before sniffing the mended nozzle with apparent approval.

Leaving the dog to guard the carriage, I pushed open the wagon's rear half-door and slipped into the cold morning air.

The feeder cut was drowning in silver river mist, but the sky overhead had turned the color of lead. I climbed the slick silt embankment, digging the toes of my boots into willow roots until my eyes cleared the rim of the canal ditch.

Looking south toward the border bridge, I expected to see the empty towpath and the quiet reed flats of the middle delta.

Instead, two towering plumes of smoke were rising into the pale morning sky.

To the west, churning from the timber line along Duke Chukwuebuka's ironworks road, rose a thick column of greasy black coal soot, propelled by the heavy boilers of ironclad siege wagons. To the east, marching steadily down Duke Oluwaseyi's canal highway, rose a broad cloud of chalk-gray dust, kicked up by hundreds of marching boots and brass caissons.

Both columns were moving at a forced march, angling directly toward the timber span of the border bridge three miles ahead. Neither army had waited for the noon sun. They were going to collide on the river crossing before breakfast was finished.