The Clockwork Spider

Devon still worked when Rilla and Lady Mara walked into his engine room, but he turned to see who dared penetrate the sanctity of his hideout. When he saw the identity of his guests, he relaxed, though he did raise an eyebrow at Lady Mara's presence. He knew that she was not likely to stay away for long, but he had not expected her this soon.

"I thought Lady Mara might wish to know what you had to say," Rilla announced.

Lady Mara nodded. "I am quite interested by this discovery of yours," she agreed. "What have you found?"

"A moment," Devon grunted, turning his attention back to the bolt he was unscrewing. The two women waited for him to finish wrestling with his bolt and allowed him to check the instrument panel hidden by a metal sheet, which had been supported by the bolt and its companions. He did not return the sheet to its place when he had finished, only set it and the bolts aside and beckoned them towards the small pile which had once been the clockwork device.

"Rilla found this yesterday," he explained for Lady Mara's benefit. "When we found it, it resembled something slightly like a spider made of metal, with a single red eye." He reached over and picked up the lens, showing it to them. Lady Mara leaned down, interested.

"May I look at it?" she asked. Devon handed the lens over, only slightly reluctantly. Sensing this, she laughed. "I'll be careful," she promised.

He nodded, watching as she examined the lens. She turned it over in her hands, peering through it. "I can see nothing," she announced.

He nodded once again. "It is designed to pick up light beams," he explained. "We have not yet the capability to reproduce the human eye, so inventors have created a lens which, fed by a small amount of steam, will capture the light in the room and transcribe what it catches onto a paper." He produced the paper, which was filled with what seemed to be a cross between Morse and the scribbling of a child. "Those who have been trained to read the pattern may then re-transcribe it as an image which all can decode. It is a clever code, and can be altered to catch sounds and send messages that one does not wish others to read."

Lady Mara nodded, and carefully handed the lens back to Devon. He took it from her with relief and set it down.

"So it is designed to spy on us?" Rilla wanted to know.

Devon nodded. "Indeed," he agreed. "The paper inside must be changed every few hours, or it will loop around itself and produce an unintelligible mass of scratchings."

"So the person who set it must be aboard the ship," Lady Mara concluded. "So that they might have access to it in order to change the paper."

"Indeed so," Devon agreed. He turned back to the pile of gears, having very little interest in the actual person who had set it. He might be interested in meeting the man who had built the thing, but the person who had bought and set it was of little importance. "The gears come from across Europe, which makes it more difficult to trace, but the workmanship is Italian."

"How can you tell?" Rilla wanted to know.

"It is always easy to tell the work of an Italian," Devon informed her. "No other craftsmen have the capabilities to create things like this. And, I must say, this device is advanced even for the craftsmen of Italy. It must be someone quite special, with access to knowledge which we do not yet have."

"Is that not most of the Italian inventors?" Lady Mara wanted to know. "Giuseppe is quite protective of their knowledge. I must say, it is probably with good reason. If all people could craft such things, then they would lose a great deal of their influence."

Devon nodded. "Indeed," he agreed. "I am actually surprised that they allowed this out of the country. It strikes me as the type of device which the government would not allow outside the borders."

"There is the possibility that they do not know of its existence, or that it left the country," Lady Mara pointed out. "It is small enough, and there are always some who will do anything for a little money, even rob their own country of what it believes is rightfully its own."

Rilla sighed. "But then we have no leads," she complained. "There are no Italians aboard the ship, so it can't be them, and we don't know to whom it belongs."

"Did you see who dropped it?" Lady Mara wanted to know.

Rilla shook her head regretfully. "I only saw it disappear into the main cabin," she said. Turning towards Devon, she added, "How did it do that? I thought not even the Italians had managed to give their inventions consciousness."

"It has none," Devon told her. "It has only mechanical motion. It's powered by very small amounts of steam, which allow the legs to pump up and down. That gives it a small range of motion, though the small amount of steam means that it cannot go far. In addition to changing the paper daily, the owner must replenish the supply of steam if it wishes for the thing to keep working."

"And does the lack of steam not also prevent the creature from capturing what it sees?" Lady Mara wanted to know.

Devon nodded. "Yes it does. I do not think it can do both at once, so I assume that it gets to its position and is then given more fuel and set to record what it sees."

Lady Mara nodded back. "I see." She stood. "Well. It seems that we have a spy aboard Urania. We must keep an eye open for their identity, clearly. Thank you for allowing me to see this." She nodded to Devon.

He stood as well. "It was my pleasure," he told her honestly. She smiled, then left the room, closing the door behind her with a soft, but definitive click.