The Havoc Machine

by Steven Harper

  “It’s prostitution,” Thad said. He couldn’t help it.

  “It is the world,” Sofiya said. “It moves the way it moves, not as you think it should. When a woman’s husband is away and she has a baby which cannot be his, she will take it to the forest or a lake and—”

  “I don’t want to hear,” Thad interrupted. “No more.”

  “The man who kills the victims of the clockwork plague balks at the death of a baby who would grow up as hated and unwanted as a clockworker,” she said. “How strange.”

  “Clockworkers aren’t victims,” Thad said. “David was a victim.”

  “Both cannot be victims?” Sofiya gestured at his hand. “You should exercise that. The more you use it, the easier it will become to control it.”

  Thad thought of refusing, then set that aside as unrealistic and childish. He flexed the hand and tried working the fingers one by one. It still felt numb. A clockworker had forced him to shoot his own hand off. He felt violated and angry and sick, and he wanted to hit something or yell or scream. Instead he made himself wiggle fingers.

  “My mother’s deed mattered little in the end,” Sofiya continued. “Papa came home last winter festival. He’d been gone for seven months, and I was so happy to see him. He was tall and strong and he had a big brown beard that made him very proud. He brought me chocolate drops from the city, and a little toy dog made of painted clay. Grigori and Nikolai, my other brothers, came from their homes to visit.”

  “Nikolai?”

  “I gave that name after my brother, yes,” Sofiya said. “We ate together and it was a fine night. But the next day Papa was coughing. When fever came, we knew what it was. By then it was too late.”

  “I’m sorry,” Thad said automatically. The thumb was especially hard to use. He folded it in and out, in and out.

  “Papa died first.” Sofiya’s voice was matter-of-fact now. “Then Mama and Nikolai. Grigori lost his mind and stumbled away. You call it a zombie. I call it my older brother, the one who used to climb trees to pick apples for me and who could whistle so like a bird, he could fool them into thinking he was one of them. I found out later someone shot him. My sister Olenka…” She trailed off.

  The pain Thad had seen in her before was back, though Sofiya was working to cover it.

  “Your sister what?” he asked.

  “She became very ill,” Sofiya said quickly, “but she recovered. I recovered from the illness, too, but I…I was different. I have seen things no one should have seen, and now I see things no one else can see.” She paused. “I went into a fugue and built a sledge that could drive itself across the snow. It took me to Saint Petersburg. But Russia is not kind to clockworkers, you know.”

  “My mother was from Minsk.”

  “She was?” Sofiya raised her eyebrows. “Then the way Russian serfs behave should not be a surprise to you.”

  “My mother never talked about her life in Minsk,” Thad replied shortly. “Ever.”

  “Perhaps this is why. Perhaps she joined the circus to get away from a landowner who—”

  “We were talking about clockworkers,” Thad interjected. He ticked off points. “England fears clockworkers. China reveres them. And Russia? Russia loathes them.” He belatedly realized he was using his brass hand and stared at it for moment.

  “True. But all three places use their—our—inventions quite happily. I knew in Saint Petersburg I would have to hide. It would not be safe if anyone knew what I had become. And then Mr. Griffin found me. I don’t know how. But he promised he could help my sister. And he has, after a fashion. Olenka has everything she needs now, and does not break her back in the field—or in a rich man’s bed.”

  “But Griffin exacts a price.”

  “Everything has a price.” She tapped his hand, and her fingernail clicked against the brass.

  “You are early in the process,” Thad said. “You haven’t gone insane. That’s how you hid your…status from me and why you can still work with other people without being cruel or wicked.”

  “I imagine so.”

  A little heat came to his voice. “Doesn’t it bother you to know that you’ll go mad and die in less than three years? Don’t you want to find a cure?”

  “A cure?” Her laugh was like ice. “This is the most fun I have had in my entire life, Thaddeus Sharpe. Ideas slice through my mind like silver knives, and they carve secrets out of the darkness. I am very much looking forward to seeing what happens next. And then, when I finally go mad, I will forget everything—the plague, my family, and every scrap of pain. I can hardly wait.”

  Thad swallowed. He had never thought that someone with the plague would want anything but a cure. A number of uncomfortable new truths were forcing themselves on him today. Thad flexed his new hand again and changed the subject. “You made this out of one of Griffin’s spiders, didn’t you?”

  “I did. I am very proud.”

  “Can he still…use it?”

  “I very much doubt it.”

  “He orders me to destroy your—my—hand over one of his blasted spiders, and then he just gives you a spider to replace it?”

  “He didn’t give. I took.” Sofiya closed her eyes. “The destruction of your hand sent me into a fugue. Your hand became a…project, and only my death could have stopped me from taking one of Mr. Griffin’s spiders. Mr. Griffin knew that, so he allowed it. He doesn’t wish me to die, you see. Not yet. I also think the entire affair amuses him.”

  “Amuses him?”

  “It put me further into his debt. And now a clockworker who uses spiders for hands has a man in his employ who has a spider for a hand. Mr. Griffin still has that spider as a hand, you see, even though you hate clockworkers. I think he couldn’t resist the irony.”

  Jaw tight, Thad pushed aside the bedclothes and swung his legs around. The last of the opiate fog had faded from his system and he was feeling normal now. Except for the hand. He looked at Sofiya.

  “You told me all that about yourself in order to change my mind about clockworkers,” he said. “So I would see a person, with history and life instead of a monster.”

  “Of course. Was I successful?”

  He exhaled slowly, as if sending clouds of thought to Mount Olympus. “I think,” he replied slowly, forming the words as the ideas came to him, “that I am willing to work with you as long as we have a common enemy in Mr. Griffin.”

  “Good. And as someone who continues to work with you, I have one favor to ask.”

  “And that would be?”

  She towed him toward the door. “It will be easier to talk about it after the cannon goes off.”

  * * *

  The machine crouched in the darkness, listening to the signal, and learning. It learned words like tunnel and darkness and metal and gears and memory and thought and knowledge and master. The knowledge came slowly, over a period of days, another new word that was part of the word time. Other spiders, ones similar but inferior to itself, brought the machine metals of many different kinds. The machine touched the metals, tasting them with its feet. It liked them, became excited by them for reasons it could not name.

  It learned the world build.

  Chapter Eight

  When they got outside, Thad discovered that the circus was fully set up. The striped Tilt held court in the center with the smaller sideshow tents trying to get its attention. Waiting behind like servants were the wagons and tents where the performers lived, including Thad, and just beyond that, the row of train cars. A web of ropes and stakes wove itself over everything. Sawdust and straw crunched underfoot as a preemptive measure to keep down the mud, and Thad inhaled smells of animals and machine oil and frying food. Marcus was playing the calliope in the Tilt, and the strangely haunting and jaunty music wandered among the tents with the performers, some of whom wore bright costumes, some of whom wore ordinary street clothes. A bit of Thad’s fear and tension eased. It was the circus, and the circus was home.

  He remembered running among ropes
and canvas walls when he was small, playing jackstraws and deerstalker, listening to the rain fall on the roof on the wagon—the same wagon Thad lived in now—while his mother sang in Russian and his father sharpened knives, watching the everyday sight of one of the horse girls in her tight sleeves and bodice and one day feeling newly strange about it, stealing a kiss from Gretchen Neuberg behind clown alley, learning to swallow swords and pick locks and throw knives, catching the eye of a beautiful, dark-haired woman in the grandstand during a performance in Warsaw, announcing to his parents that he was leaving the circus to marry his Ekaterina.

  Leaving had been difficult, but good. He’d had his new life in Warsaw. But bit by bit that life had been whittled away. Ekaterina died in childbirth. His parents passed away, and he inherited their old wagon. And then David. When the last fragment of his new life had slipped from his fingers, he had pulled the old wagon out of storage and gone on the road, ostensibly as a traveling tinker and knife sharpener, but really to hunt down clockworkers. And when he’d come across the Kalakos Circus eking out performances in Prague, it seemed perfectly natural to join up with them. It was coming home again, in a sad way.

  It wasn’t truly the same, of course. Thad kept to himself these days. He avoided making close friends, avoided anything resembling romance. It was easier to pass time alone than to befriend people he would one day lose. Even if it meant being lonely.

  Overhead, clouds were drifting in to cover the sun, and the air was chilly. Benny Mazur, the chief clown, stuck his head out of clown alley—the little tent where the clowns got ready—and called something to Nathan Storm, who was just passing by. Nathan nodded, then caught sight of Thad outside his wagon and dashed over, a wide smile on his face.

  “Glad to see you’re upright, then,” he said in his light Irish brogue. He clapped Thad on the back. “Wouldn’t want to lose our sword swallower to some stupid pistol accident.”

  “I told them,” Sofiya said quickly, “how you were cleaning your equipment and one of your pistols went off.”

  “Oh. Yes,” Thad said. “Stupid.”

  “And this one.” Nathan swept off his cap, revealing deep red hair, and kissed Sofiya’s hand. “Beautiful and brilliant. I hope you thanked her. She’s our Russian rescuer.”

  “Spaceeba, ser,” Sofiya said with a laugh.

  “Our?” Thad was becoming more and more confused.

  “Tsar Alexander is quite the horseman, and he was taken with Miss Ekk’s mechanical horse—and her beauty. It was because of her that we were allowed to set up on the Field of Mars and, best of all, were called to perform for the court in a few days. So polish your swords, friend.” His eyes sparkled with an enthusiasm Thad hadn’t seen in months. “May I see the new hand, then?”

  Thad wanted to hold back. But he was going into the ring eventually, and anyone who paid a few coins would see it. He may as well get used to showing it off now. He held it up and wiggled the fingers. The gears inside whirled with tiny zing noises.

  “Nice enough,” Nathan said. “Can you pull swords out of your throat with it?”

  Thad looked at Sofiya, stricken. The idea that he might not be able to perform anymore hadn’t occurred to him.

  “Probably,” she said. “He will have to practice first. Tell Dodd not to put him on the schedule until we are sure.”

  “My lady.” Nathan kissed Sofiya’s hand again and left.

  “I love the circus,” Sofiya said with a small sigh. “No one cares that I am…what I am.”

  “And I am…confused,” Thad said. “Did you tell them you’re a clockworker?”

  “They deduced rather easily when I rebuilt your hand, Thad. They also think I built Nikolai, and I have not persuaded them otherwise.”

  “And it doesn’t bother—”

  “No.”

  “I don’t understand.” Thad was genuinely perplexed. “Three years ago, this circus gave shelter to a man who turned out to be a clockworker, and not only did he destroy their prize clockwork elephant, he also led a small army of other clockworkers into their midst, broke the dam at Kiev, and caused a flood that scattered half their performers. They hate clockworkers. With good reason.”

  She threaded her arm into the crook of his elbow as they walked. “You need to stop seeing the world as either-or, Thaddeus Sharpe. Dodd needed to be persuaded, yes, but everyone was very impressed when I saved your hand. I also brought them the money from Mr. Griffin. This helped quite a lot.”

  “And put them—still puts them—in the most terrible danger,” Thad pointed out sharply.

  “They don’t know this.” Sofiya waved this away. “I also brought the circus a mechanical horse so it can still be the Kalakos Circus of Automatons and Other Wonders.”

  “Did you promise not to go mad and kill everyone?” Thad asked.

  “No, but I said I would look into replacing the elephant. That, and a performance for the tsar brought Dodd around.”

  Thad was working his brass fingers like mad, trying to bring them under greater control. There was always a short delay between what he wanted them to do and what they did, and that would be deadly in an act like his. It didn’t seem real yet. It felt more like he was wearing a strange glove or a temporary splint that would eventually come off, revealing his real hand.

  “I’m pleased to know everything is going well for you,” he said with a certain amount of grim irony. “What are you doing in the ring for the tsar, then?”

  “You’ll see.” She smiled, and Thad noticed for the first time she had dimples. “Wait a moment. How did I not notice this before? You spoke Russian earlier!”

  “Of course.” Thad managed a grin of his own. “My mother spoke it to me every day. To me, it’s as easy as English.”

  “Then why have I spoken English with you all this time?”

  “Perhaps clockworkers aren’t as smart they think.”

  A cannon fired with a sound that boomed against Thad’s bones. He jumped. Sofiya took his arm.

  “We must go,” she said in English again. “Hurry.”

  He followed her through the maze of tents, automatically ducking under and around ropes and dodging stakes. “What was that? What’s going on?”

  They reached the outer boundary of the area set aside for the circus. It appeared to be a parade ground or drilling field for the military and was the size of four polo fields spread out before one of the biggest, most ornate buildings Thad had ever seen. The building went on and on, in fact, block after block. It was three stories tall, with white pillars and arched windows and bright yellow bricks. Decades of stamping feet had trampled the field into reddish dirt and dust. A series of wooded parks bordered two other sides of the field, and the remaining side faced a wide silver river clogged with small boats and rafts. The circus was set up near one of the parks, not far from the river. Across from them, in front of the long building, stood a grandstand much like the one inside the Tilt, though this one also had a partial roof on it. Men and women in colorful clothing were settling into seats.

  “Marsovo Pole,” Sofiya said. The Field of Mars. She started across the flat dusty field toward the grandstand, her scarlet cloak stirring in the slight breeze. “It is named after the Roman god of war, of course. That building over there”— she pointed at the long, pillared structure—“is an army barrack. And that is the River Neva. The cannon is fired from the roof of the Peter and Paul Fortress on the other side every day at noon.”

  “Why did we rush so? What is everyone gathering for?”

  “That.” Sofiya pointed toward the River Neva. A wide road ran from the edge of the Field of Mars, between two blocky buildings, and up to a great pontoon bridge, easily four carriages wide and supported underneath by what looked like a long row of giant rowboats turned upside down. Thad dug around in his memory for what little he knew about Saint Petersburg and recalled that even though it was a city of rivers, canals, and giant islands, Peter the Great had forbidden permanent bridges on the grounds that they were ugly. Bu
t either pontoon bridges were exempted from his ban, or Tsar Alexander had changed the law himself—Thad couldn’t remember. The pontoon bridges weren’t high enough to allow anything but the lowest boats to slip beneath them, which curtailed ship traffic on the river but encouraged thriving schools of rowboats, skiffs, and rafts.

  On the other side of the river was one of Saint Petersburg’s enormous islands. The bridge to it had been cleared of all traffic but for a single cart. The cart had no horse and no driver. It was painted gold and azure, and ornate designs and curlicues wound their way all over it like metal vines. Underneath the cart puffed a little engine that was currently following a strip of iron laid across the bridge. On the bed of the cart was golden cage of sturdy bars, and in the cage was a man. He was naked, and his skin was covered in dirt and filth. His hair and beard tangled into a greasy mess, and he clung to the bars with both hands and feet like a chimpanzee. Animal growls and snorts emerged from his throat.

  By now Thad and Sofiya were closer to the roofed-over grandstand, and Thad could see the people better. Their clothing was rich beyond belief. The women wore enormous off-the-shoulder dresses of satin and velvet embroidered with metallic thread in geometric designs. The sleeves were narrow at the top and ballooned out toward the wrist, and the skirts were so wide and heavy with crinolines, a single woman might take up four spaces on the grandstand. Most sported fox or ermine wraps against the chilly air. One woman, looking pale and sickly, wore a formfitting cage of actual gold wire with tiny gears, wheels, and pistons in it that whirled and twisted the soft wire to bend it with her every move. All the women’s hair was elaborately styled, curled and piled high and laden with jeweled pins or combs. Their faces were painted with rouge and puffed with powder. Many of the men wore military uniforms—bright blue coats that dripped gold braid from their chests and shoulders over bloodred trousers. Mustaches and side whiskers were waxed and pointed, though actual beards were absent. Their shiny black boots were pointed, and some curled upward. The nonmilitary men wore elaborate coats of their own, ones that nearly reached their knees.