Peart Neil - Clockwork Lives

Book Description

Some lives can be summed up in a sentence or two.

Other lives are epics.

In Clockwork Angels, #1 bestselling author Kevin J. Anderson and legendary Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart created a fabulous, adventurous steampunk world in a novel to accompany the smash Rush concept album of the same name. It was a world of airships and alchemy, clockwork carnivals, pirates, lost cities, a rigid Watchmaker who controlled every aspect of life, and his nemesis, the ruthless and violent Anarchist who wanted to destroy it all.

Anderson and Peart have returned to their colorful creation to explore the places and the characters that still have a hold on their imagination. Clockwork Lives is a steampunk Canterbury Tales, and much more. The Booksellers Tale is the first tale to be released.

One of Many Possible Worlds

Kevin J. Anderson
Neil Peart

Digital Edition 2015

WordFire Press
wordfirepress.com

ISBN: 978-1-61475-329-2

Copyright (c) 2015 WordFire, Inc. and Neil Peart.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the authors imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

This work is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover and Interior artwork by Nick Robles

Book Design by RuneWright, LLC
www.RuneWright.com

Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

Published by
WordFire Press, an imprint of
WordFire, Inc.
PO Box 1840
Monument, CO 80132

Contents

Prologue

Some lives can be summed up in a sentence or two.

Other lives are epics.

In the quiet, sleepy village of Lugtown in the Watchmakers land of Albion, Marinda Peake wants nothing more than to have a calm and predictable life. In order to care for her ailing alchemist father, she gave up her expected marriage, her expected career, her expected life.

But when her father dies, Marinda does not receive the inheritance she expects. Instead, he bequeaths her a mysterious empty book of Clockwork Lives, and she is not allowed have her home or her life until she fills that book with the stories of others who lived lives and experienced adventures that Marinda never did.

She is forced to cross Albion in her quest to fill the book while having her own adventures on the way.

The Booksellers Tale

One of Many Possible Worlds

I was in love with more than just books. My husband and I share a passion for reading, and that common tie bound us together with a passion for each other that made us perfect companions, like matching bookends on an infinite shelf of favorite stories.

Omar and I first met in a library under the glow of coldfire reading lamps, both interested in the same book, and rather than let one of us go home disappointed, we took the volume to a coffee shop and read to each other. We met again and again for days. We enjoyed the activity so much that we decided on another book when we were finishedboth of us choosing the same title without any hints from the other.

People tend to view the past through tinted lenses, a halo effect, remembering only the ideals that we wanted to see, but Im not deluding myself. Omar and I did indeed have a love and a partnership that rivaled anything in a classic romantic novel. We were giddy with each other.

And that is what makes my tale all the more poignant, all the more sad. With our intimate knowledge of literary tropes and the expectations of a story, Omar and I should have been well aware that a great romance requires a separation, a loss. No masterpiece follows the storyline of They fell in love, they remained happy, and lived out the rest of their days in companionable bliss. The end. The quest for the unattainable is a far more compelling story than a simple happily-ever-after.

Fortunately, my story is not yet over, and I am waiting to see how it all ends.

O O O

After Omar and I were married, it seemed like the guiding hand of Fate when we discovered a small bookshop for sale. A curious establishment far from any main commercial thoroughfare, it was cluttered and disorganized, filled with countless oddities. The owner had mysteriously vanished, leaving no heir and no instructions.

It was wonderful.

Omar had a good salary as an assistant manager of a gentlemans clothing shop, and the Watchmaker had given us one hundred gold honeybee coins as a congratulatory gift to start our collaborative lives, as he gave to all newlyweds. We counted our coins, stretched our finances, and saw that we could barely afford the purchase, but Omar and I didnt really have to discuss the question. Both of us knew that the shop was destined to be ours. That was as predictable as a plot twist in a clichd penny-dreadful novel. We dickered with the property agent who represented the sale of the abandoned bookshop and came to an agreement. We signed the deed, and Omar and I became the new proprietors of Underworld Books.

The doors had been locked before our purchase, and the property agent had only allowed us to look around briefly, but now that we owned the shop, we could explore it all, read every volume if we desired. Neither of us cared about the profitability of selling those obscure bookswe just wanted to peruse them to our hearts content. That made us lackluster business owners, but well-satisfied readers.

On the first day, I cut an apple into wedges for each of us to eat while we explored our store. We looked at the shelves, the overstuffed chairs where readers could enjoy books the way they were meant to be enjoyed.

Behind the front desk in a back room was a peculiar framed dressing mirror that had no reflecting glass, but rather an opalescent surface like rainbows mixed with pearls. On a small curio table next to the moonstone mirror was a volume showing an etched silhouette of the looking glass and the plain but intriguing words Users Manual.

The manual contained complex and incomprehensible graphs and tables, explanations of dimensional trigonometry, calibration logs, and activation instructions. The mathematical symbols and derivations meant nothing to us, but on the last page, handwritten wordsthe former bookshop owners?gave advice: Be careful, but enjoy. There are more stories than one world can contain or produce, but they should be made available to all.

Neither of us knew what to make of this, but Omar and I followed the activation instructions in the book, the patterns and paths marked on the gold frame, curious to see what would happen. We discovered that although the reflective moonstone film made a very poor reflecting glass, it turned out to be an excellent