The Havoc Machine

by Steven Harper

  “As you said,” Mr. Griffin interrupted. “But by your own admission, the boy means nothing to you.”

  Now that was typical clockworker harshness. What did the boy think? Thad shot a glance behind his chair. If the boy was listening—and how could he avoid it?—there was no way to read his expression, if he had one, through the rags and scarf.

  What does it matter? Thad thought. He’s just a machine and has no feelings to hurt.

  “At the time,” Thad replied simply, “I had no idea the boy was anything other than…what he appeared to be. I’m sorry to have wasted your time, and I’ll refund the money immediately.”

  A burst of static emerged from the speaker grill and Thad flinched despite himself. “The money is unimportant to me, Mr. Sharpe. I have other concerns.”

  The money was unimportant, meaning Mr. Griffin had access to a great deal of it. That was a bad sign. One of the few things that kept clockworkers in check was lack of access to materials. More than one clockworker had designed a weapon powerful enough to crack a country in half but had been thwarted by a simple inability to obtain enough need-more-ium, or whatever rare element they needed. Mr. Griffin was proving more and more dangerous as time went on, and Thad would have to do something about him. Unfortunately, the box didn’t even have a cord running out the back, which meant Thad couldn’t trace its source that way. The real Mr. Griffin could be anywhere in Vilnius. The man clearly a master of the wireless signal, another useful fact.

  “You have other concerns,” Thad prompted.

  “And you will help me with them, Mr. Sharpe.”

  Thad shifted uneasily. “And why will I do that? You have to know my attitude toward clockworkers like yourself.”

  “I told you I was beyond such classifications, Mr. Sharpe. In any case, go to the window, if you would be so kind, and you will have all the explanation you need.”

  Warily, Thad went to the window, leaving the boy by the chair. The window looked down into an alley that ran between the hotel and the building next to it. At the bottom of the alley stood Sofiya. She was holding Blackie on a lead rein and standing as far away from him as possible.

  “What the hell?” Thad said, startled.

  “Something very similar to it,” Mr. Griffin said.

  And then a swarm of mechanical spiders rushed over Blackie. In less than a second, the horse was covered in brass and iron. Their claws flashed, and through the glass Thad heard both the tearing and ripping sounds mingle with Blackie’s short scream. Sofiya let go the rein and pressed herself against the alley wall. The mound of spiders collapsed to the ground, seething and moving. Then they scattered and fled, leaving thousands of tiny red footprints. A dreadful pile of scarlet flesh and yellow bone surrounded by a spreading puddle of blood steamed on the alley stones. Sofiya turned and quickly walked away. Thad stared, his breath coming in short pants. The entire event had lasted mere seconds. He pressed his hand to the cold window glass. Every muscle in his body was tight. Fear and helpless rage mired together in a black morass.

  “My stolen spiders watch, Mr. Sharpe,” said Mr. Griffin. “They watch, and when I tell them to, they act. They have been watching you since you arrived in Vilnius, Mr. Sharpe. How do you think Miss Ekk’s messenger knew where to find you on the street?”

  The pain of Blackie’s loss dragged at Thad, and he wanted to bury his head in his arms. Dammit, Blackie was just a horse. A stupid horse. But David had named him. Blackie was a link to that part of his life, and now it was gone, shredded into a red pile on alleyway stones. The outrage of it dimmed Thad’s vision. He clenched a fist. There was a knife in it.

  “Don’t bother,” Mr. Griffin said. “You have to know by now that I’m nowhere near you, and that I can react far faster than you can act.”

  Thad forced the knife back into his sleeve sheath and got his breathing back under control. “What was the point of that, Griffin?”

  “I can watch or I can act, Mr. Sharpe. The one is more pleasant than the other.”

  Every spider in the room drummed its claws on wood and plaster in unison. It made a sound like a dreadful mechanical army marching one step forward. The boy whimpered.

  “Stop it,” Thad said. “You’re frightening—”

  “Yes?” Mr. Griffin said.

  Sofiya came into the room, her scarlet cloak swirling about her body as she shut the door and sat down again. Her face was impassive but pale.

  “Now I understand. You wear that cloak to hide the blood,” Thad observed nastily.

  She turned hard blue eyes on him. “No,” was all she said.

  “Please don’t upset Miss Ekk,” Griffin said. “None of this is her doing, and good operatives are difficult to find. We also have much to do.”

  Thad pursed his lips and turned away from her, already regretting his words. Sofiya wasn’t the person he was angry at. “I’m upset, I need a bath, and I’m not good at dancing. What exactly do you need, Griffin?”

  “I need,” Mr. Griffin said, “to find a way to Russia.”

  Thad folded his arms in a shaky bit of bravado that Mr. Griffin couldn’t see and forced himself to get a grip, push his problems aside and concentrate, as if he were in the ring. Problems didn’t matter in the ring, only the performance. He would deal with the loss of Blackie and the boy’s presence and the anger and the sorrow later. Right now he had to deal with other things. This room was a ring, and in the ring Thad could swallow any number of swords without blinking.

  “That’s the length of it?” he said. “You need to get to Russia? Hire a coach. Buy a train ticket.” And don’t notice that I’m following you with my blades drawn.

  “It’s more complicated than that. You had interactions with the peasants in the village. What was it like?”

  Thad remembered the knives and the pitchforks and the tension in the crowd when he and Sofiya had first arrived back in the village. He also remembered how poor the villagers had been and how wealthy he and Sofiya appeared to be.

  “Tense,” he said.

  “These are bad economic times.” Sofiya sat pale and regal in her chair. “The landowners wring every kopeck from the peasants in both Russia and in the Polish-Lithuanian Union, and they spend the coins on their own lavish lifestyles. They draft the young men into their armies and force the young women to work in their palaces. The common people are slaves in all but name.”

  “You sound like you have experience with that,” Thad observed.

  “I am a peasant, Mr. Sharpe,” she replied. “Does that shock you?”

  “You don’t act like a peasant.”

  “And you don’t act like a human being. The world is an incredible place.”

  “Now, look—”

  “At any rate,” Mr. Griffin interrupted through his speaker, “peasant resentment to this treatment is increasing. In addition, the Ukrainian Empire has fallen apart, and that has emboldened the peasants elsewhere. Vilnius is quiet, but farther out, feelings have become, to use your word, tense. No one has actually attacked a landowner’s stronghold yet, but the peasantry has begun to express its displeasure in other ways. Telegraph lines are cut. Herds owned by the landowner are raided by ‘wolves.’ Coaches are robbed. And the state-owned trains, ones that transport passengers and conscripted troops, are sabotaged. All of this, you see, is a roundabout way of saying that coach and train travel between here and Saint Petersburg has become dreadfully unreliable, and I’m afraid I cannot stomach the unreliable.” Mr. Griffin gave a chocolatey chuckle, as if he had made a private joke.

  Thad put his hands on his knees. “So you want me to find a reliable way.”

  “No. I’ve already found one. I need you to finish it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Of course you don’t. I haven’t explained it yet,” Mr. Griffin snapped. “As you can see, Mr. Sharpe, I travel with a great deal of luggage, enough to take up two train cars. You are going to get those train cars to Saint Petersburg by the end of the week.”

&n
bsp; “By hauling them myself?”

  “I selected you as an employee for two reasons, Mr. Sharpe. The first was that you were the best candidate to get Havoc’s invention. You failed. The second reason is that you are attached to a circus train.”

  A dreadful light dawned. Thad’s mouth went dry. Now more people were getting involved. He had to talk fast. “Look, the Kalakos Circus isn’t a passenger train. You can’t ask Ringmaster Dodd to take on—”

  The spiders clacked their claws in unison again, cutting Thad off. The memory of Blackie’s last scream echoed in his head.

  “You will persuade the ringmaster,” Mr. Griffin’s smooth voice said. “You will use my money and your words and whatever actions you feel will accomplish this task. You will keep any particulars you have deduced about me to yourself. You will definitely not tell the circus anything about my nature or about the circumstances of our dealings. You will remember that my spiders are watching. They are watching that parrot you’re so fond of. They are watching Ringmaster Dodd and his circus. They are watching the boy. And they are watching you.”

  Thad got to his feet, pale as Sofiya. “You’ll get your damned train.”

  “So glad to hear it,” Mr. Griffin said.

  “And once you arrive in Russia,” Thad added, “we’re finished. You go your way, and I go mine.”

  Mr. Griffin said, “Just tell your ringmaster that the tsar loves a circus.”

  * * *

  The signal touched the machine with a soft finger. It awoke, moved all ten legs, and felt its way through darkness. There were obstacles in its way, some hard, some soft, some sticky. The machine pushed them aside or found a way round them. Once it had to pull its legs in tight and scoot on its belly. Through it all, the signal’s haunting melody pulled it forward.

  The obstacles ended. The machine spiraled down a long staircase, skittered down a stone passageway, and found itself in a deep pit. Without pausing, it climbed the walls and pushed aside the long, thin objects dangling near at top. It sensed a vague warmth overhead and saw shapes of other objects around it. The machine didn’t pause to make sense of anything—the signal continued its pull.

  Freed of constraint now, the machine ran. Some of the objects it encountered jumped back and made sounds, but the machine kept running. Eventually it came to a long line of boxy objects sitting on metal wheels. The signal beckoned. Other objects moved about the machine in a rushed cacophony of sound and light and heat. If these objects noticed the machine, they didn’t react to it. The machine dashed up to the boxlike object that was emitting the sweet signal, crawled underneath to the metal undercarriage, and clamped all ten legs to a metal bar.

  It waited.

  Chapter Five

  Drums rolled and the sword slid into Thad’s stomach. He kept his breathing deep and even to suppress his gag reflex, and he held the pommel just above his teeth while he stared straight up at the canvas peak of the Tilt, holding his neck and esophagus perfectly straight. Already the Flying Tortellis were climbing into the rigging in their bright outfits, ready to fly on the trapezes once Thad was done.

  Thad let go of the sword, and the drumroll ended with a cymbal smash. The blunted tip was digging into the bottom of his stomach. He held the position and spread his arms.

  “Bless my soul!” Dante whistled from his shoulder.

  Always at this moment, the blade divided Thad between life and death. A wrong move—a cough, a sneeze, a swallow—and he would die. And yet he felt no fear. Here he had control of his body, of the sword, even of the audience. Anything that happened would come solely from him. He hung there, divided, for a moment longer, then he then drew the blade back out in a swift hand-under-hand movement and swept into a bow.

  The audience gave a scattering of applause. Thad’s performance wasn’t at fault—the grandstand wasn’t even a third full. Unfortunately, Vilnius, like the rest of the region, was enduring economic bad times and not many people had coins to spare for the circus.

  Thad, who was wearing a pirate costume that Dante nicely completed, wiped the sword clean with a handkerchief he kept at his belt and sheathed the sword as Dodd, the ringmaster, dashed into the ring with his cane and his red-and-white-striped dress shirt and his scarlet top hat.

  “Thaddeus Sharpe,” he boomed, and the limp applause stirred itself to something resembling life. Thad trotted out of the ring as Dodd announced the Flying Tortellis.

  Sofiya in her cloak and the boy in his rags were waiting for him just outside the back entrance flap for the performers. The sky was overcast with damp gray clouds that threatened rain at any moment and the air carried a chill, which added nothing to the circus atmosphere.

  “That was impressive,” Sofiya said. “And more than a little disgusting.”

  “Thank you,” Thad acknowledged. “Speaking of disgusting, we need to talk.”

  “Hm.” Sofiya pulled Thad farther away from the Tilt, onto trampled grass. “I told you before—not here in the open.”

  The boy came with them. His eyes were large. “You were incredible! I’ve never seen anything like it! You swallowed that whole knife! And then two knives! And then a sword! How do you do that? Have you ever cut yourself?”

  “Only once,” Thad replied, feeling pleased nonetheless, especially after the lackluster audience. “And you aren’t to touch any of the—” He stopped. Why was he cautioning a machine?

  “Go on,” Sofiya said with a small smile. She seemed to enjoy taunting him with the boy, and Thad didn’t understand that. Inside the Tilt, Antonio Tortelli did a double somersault into the hands of his father.

  “Never mind,” Thad muttered.

  “Bad boy, bad boy,” Dante interjected.

  “I liked it,” the boy piped up. “I’ve never seen a circus before. Does the elephant have a name?”

  “Betsy,” Thad replied absently, “though we tell everyone her name is Maharajah.”

  “Does she eat clowns?”

  Before Thad could reply, Dodd emerged from the Tilt, brandishing his cane. Under the ridiculous top hat he was a handsome man, sandy-haired and brown-eyed, not yet thirty. Young for a ringmaster. He’d managed to grow respectable side whiskers, at least, though they did little to make him look older. He was also a talented tinker and blacksmith who could make basic repairs to automatons and even build simple machines if had the plans, but he wasn’t a clockworker. Lately, Thad had noticed he moved heavier than usual, and when he wasn’t in the ring, he had stopped smiling. His top hat seemed to weigh him down.

  “There you are,” he said. The calliope hooted in the background, providing music for the Tortellis. “You said you wanted to talk, and I have time now. Once the flyers are finished, the joeys will come on for a while, though even they won’t get much out of this crowd.”

  “It’s less of a crowd,” Thad observed, putting off the inevitable, “and more of a sprinkle.”

  Dodd rubbed his face with his free hand. “I know. And frankly, we’re in deep. If we don’t get more people in, we won’t even be able to buy coal to fire up the locomotive and leave town.” He caught sight of Sofiya. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  Thad made introductions, though he left the boy out, which naturally meant that Dodd turned to him. “And who’s this strapping young lad, then?”

  They had a story ready, that the boy didn’t understand English and that Thad was thinking about taking him on as an apprentice, that Thad preferred to keep his name a—

  “His name,” Sofiya put in with a mischievous look at Thad, “is Nikolai.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Nikolai.” Dodd shook the boy’s rag-wrapped hand. “You can call me Ringmaster Dodd.”

  “Nikolai,” the boy said, as if he were tasting the word.

  “Nikolai?” Thad repeated, caught completely off guard.

  “That is his name, isn’t it?” Dodd looked a bit puzzled.

  “Of course.” Sofiya put her hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Everyone needs a name. Thad and I are looking
after him, Ringmaster.”

  “Are you?” Dodd said, apparently not sure how to react.

  “Nikolai,” the boy said again.

  “He’s an automaton,” Thad told him abruptly.

  A moment of silence stretched out amid the group. Sofiya stared at Thad, her eyes wide, her mouth an O.

  “What?” Thad said. “Was that a secret?”

  “I’m not supposed to tell anyone,” Nikolai said softly. “Mr. Havoc would get angry.”

  Thad shrugged. “You don’t have to worry about what Mr. Havoc thinks anymore.”

  “Oh. That’s true,” said Nikolai.

  “Who’s Mr. Havoc?” asked Dodd.

  “The clockworker who built Nikolai.”

  “Ah.” Dodd nodded. “Does he also build elephants, by chance?”

  “Not these days.”

  “Now, look—” said Sofiya.

  “Pity. Not that we have the money to pay for one. Is Nikolai joining us? Is that why you bought him?”

  Thad made a face. “I didn’t buy him.”

  “May I have him, then? I’ll take good care of him.”

  “No!” Nikolai grabbed Thad’s hand in a tight grip. Thad felt his metal joints through the rags. “You can’t give me away!”

  “He seems rather attached to me,” Thad replied, surprised at his own regret.

  “That’s incredible workmanship. I had no idea he wasn’t real.” Dodd knelt down again to look at Nikolai who stared back at him. “Can he perform? We’re short, you know.”

  Sofiya coughed loudly. A gleam of metal caught Thad’s eye and he glanced up. A spider was perched on top of the Tilt, the main tent. Thad tensed. The memory of Blackie’s blood spread through his mind. Even as he watched, the spider moved unhurriedly around the curve of canvas and out of sight. The outrage returned and made Thad’s hands shake. A clockworker was forcing him to betray his friends.

  Just do it now, he thought. And plan for later.

  Thad cleared his own throat. “At any rate, Dodd, I did want to ask—”

  “We have an offer for you,” Sofiya interrupted.

  “I thought I was going to do this,” Thad protested.