The Havoc Machine

by Steven Harper

  “Bless my soul,” said Dante.

  “Grand! Your parrot is fixed,” Nathan said with relentless cheer. “Can you do you the pirate sword swallower again? We could use it.”

  “Not yet,” Thad hedged. “Look—”

  “Oh, and some soldiers are looking for you.”

  “Soldiers?” Thad was on full alert now. “What do you mean soldiers?”

  “My Russian isn’t the best. Something about General Parkarov wanting to talk to you about your promise to the tsarina? They’re coming now. Jesus, Thad—what have you been doing, then?”

  Even as Nathan spoke, a contingent of four stern-faced soldiers in red uniforms came around another wagon into view. Thad swallowed. Sofiya, dressed in a simple dark skirt and blouse, came to the door.

  “What is happening?” she demanded.

  “Another trip to the Winter Palace, I expect.” Thad held out his arm so Dante could leap down to his shoulder, then moved down the steps so he wouldn’t have to touch Sofiya. “You stay with Nikolai.”

  “What do I do about these invitations?” Nathan asked.

  “Refuse politely and invite them to the show,” Thad said.

  The soldiers said little beyond repeating what Nathan had said, that General Parkarov wanted to see Thad—not Sofiya. At least he didn’t seem to be under arrest. But they took him across the Field of Mars toward the barrack on the western side, not to the Winter Palace.

  A line of wheeled cages stretched across the muddy field like a twisted parody of a train. The cages were crammed with men, women, and even children. Some cried out and reached through the bars. Others huddled inside like frightened animals. A few were clearly dead. Their clothes said they came from all classes, from street poor to well born. Even as Thad watched, horrified, a team of automatons hauled at the cages, tugging the train toward the bridge, the same one the clockworker had come across earlier in his cage.

  “What’s this?” Thad asked, eyes wide. “What’s going on?” But the soldiers didn’t answer. They firmly marched him into the wide blue barrack. The interior didn’t match the stunning exterior—long, twisting hallways of scuffed wood, no real attempt at decoration, the heavy smell of tobacco and sweat, spare offices, occasional sitting rooms, and long rows of barrack rooms. Soldiers of all ages in various states of dress rushed everywhere, looking harried. Uniformed boys as young as five dodged around carrying messages, laundry, and parcels. Thad wondered how many had been conscripted.

  He was shown to a rather larger office redolent with overly sweet tobacco smoke. General Parkarov was waiting for him, pipe in mouth. He greeted Thad heartily.

  “We need you down in the Peter and Paul Fortress,” he said.

  “You speak English?” Thad asked in surprise.

  “Yes, and I would enjoy the chance to practice. Come—my driver is waiting.”

  They trooped back outside, where a two-horse carriage awaited them. The line of cages was already gone, but another line of empty ones was taking its place. In the city beyond, Thad’s ears picked up hoofbeats and crashes and screams and the occasional pistol shot. His mouth went dry and his brass hand clutched the side of the carriage as he and the general boarded.

  “What is happening, General?” he demanded. “Please explain!”

  The driver whipped up the horses and carriage jolted forward. “You know that my investigation into the bombing turned up those foreign spiders in the Nicholas Hall,” the general said. “That can only mean one thing—a clockworker used those spiders to place the bomb under the tsar’s throne. We must find him. Even if the tsar hadn’t ordered it, I would do so.”

  “Actually, I’d like to discuss that with you, sir,” Thad said carefully. “No clockworker would use a tool so blunt as dynamite. It—”

  “Clearly one did.” The general waved Thad’s objections aside. “It is well known that a number of clockworkers run about loose in Saint Petersburg. They come here from Poland and Belarus and Lithuania, sniffing for the money they need for their inventions. It’s the only thing that stops them—not having enough money or materials to build what they want. That, and men like us.” He clapped Thad on the back. “Ah, the bridge.”

  The horses clopped onto the massive pontoon bridge that spanned the River Neva. Traffic was light this morning, allowing the carriage to make good time. The boats turned upside down to make up the pontoons barely bobbed on the inky water. Skiffs and small boats glided about, hemmed in by the low bridges that divided the Neva into sections. To Thad’s left, the wide, deep river flowed around a number of large islands, where it emptied into the Gulf of Finland and ultimately, the Baltic Sea. The breeze on the bridge was cold and smelled of fish. Thad wished he had worn a heavier coat.

  “Do you know Saint Petersburg?” the general asked, and continued before he got an answer. “There to the west is Vasilyevsky Island. You see the Kunstkammer there on the bank, Russia’s first museum, founded by Peter the Great himself! I am related to him, you know, on my mother’s side.”

  “Are you?” Thad asked casually. “Do you have estates, then?”

  “Oh yes. Quite extensive. I am forced to stay here near the tsar and can only visit irregularly. Would you like to visit yourself? My holdings are very beautiful in the spring.”

  “That sounds wonderful. Let me ask Ringmaster Dodd about his plans for the circus, and we can talk of it later,” Thad replied, careful to be vague. He pointed at Vasilyevsky Island, which spread across the horizon to the west. About half of it seemed to be wooded. The other half was grown over with buildings. “What’s that building near the museum?”

  “Ah! The Russian Academy of Sciences. Human beings work there. No clockworkers. I have heard your ringmaster is a tinker. He might enjoy talking to some of our good Russian engineers, yes?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Past it, downstream, are the docks, of course. The pride of Saint Petersburg! They are the reason my cousin Peter the Great wanted this city built in the first place—to give Russia a good seaport. Everything imaginable comes into Russia through those docks. Cousin Peter ordered a foundry built down there, in fact. Much easier to smelt raw ore brought in by the ships when the foundry is by the shipyards. My cousin Peter was a great thinker!”

  And the general certainly didn’t want anyone to forget who his cousin was, Thad mused. “A great man,” Thad repeated.

  “And up ahead”—the general pointed with his pipe to where the bridge led—“is the other big island of Saint Petersburg: Petrogradsky. Beside it”—he pointed again, this time to a smaller island ahead and a little to the left and entirely ringed with a high stone wall—“is our destination, the Peter and Paul Fortress. That was also built by—”

  “Your cousin Peter the Great?” Thad finished.

  The general laughed. “Everything here was built by my cousin Peter. We only build higher on his mighty shoulders.”

  They finished crossing to Petrogradsky Island and took another, smaller, pontoon bridge to the Peter and Paul Fortress. An arched stone gate within the walls stood open, admitting quite a lot of foot and carriage traffic to a cobblestoned courtyard. A second gate let them into the fortress proper. The general wouldn’t explain anything to Thad about what was going on, which made him tense and frustrated. He wanted to make demands, but of course he couldn’t, not a general related to a tsar.

  The fortress was more like a small, wealthy city than a military encampment. Stone streets wound among elaborate building scattered about a cathedral with a golden spire that poked high into the cloudy sky. People were everywhere—richly robed priests and plainly dressed acolytes and ladies in their bell-shaped dresses and men on horses and soldiers on foot. And the automatons! So many, they nearly outnumbered the people—clicking spiders and spindly horses and automatic carriages and automaton servants. Thad hadn’t seen so many automatons in the open since he had come to Russia, though he couldn’t help but notice that none of them moved with the ease and lifelike grace of Nikolai. The general di
dn’t seem to notice.

  “Every tsar in Russia is buried beneath that cathedral over there,” he said proudly. “My family visits Peter’s tomb every year. The cannon that goes off every day at noon fires from the fortress walls, you know.”

  At that, Thad noticed the heavy cannons and armaments lining the fortress walls. Huge energy weapons and cannons that could fire halfway to London and crouching automatons that, when they stood, could probably hurl boulders. It looked like enough firepower to level a major city. Thad was impressed. The Russian flag flew at three of the four corners of the fortress walls. At the fourth, a blank green flag was just going up. Parkarov nodded at it.

  “That means I’m here,” he said. “When the tsar or his family visits, the flag is red. You can see the arms up on the walls. This place was originally built to defend Saint Petersburg from invasion by the Swedes, though in the end, the cowards never arrived. Best for them in the end, I suppose.”

  A trio of dog-sized spiders scampered past, looking tiny after all the enormous war machines. “Why are so many automatons on the street here?” Thad asked.

  “That is part of where we are going,” the general answered as they pulled up in front of a blocky, two-story building of stone. “Here we are: the Trubetskoy Bastion, the best prison in all Russia. No one has ever escaped.”

  A penny dropped in Thad’s head. “You keep your clockworkers here. And that’s why so many automatons run about on this island.”

  “Exactly. Most of Russia’s automatons serve the military, as is proper.” He brought Thad up the steps, through a series of hallways past guards and checkpoints, and down an electric lift that left them in what Thad could only describe as a dungeon. The walls, floors, and ceiling were constructed of solid stone blocks. The ceiling was low. Damp hallways lit by electric lanterns snaked in a dozen directions, and they were faced with small, narrow doors, each with a tiny barred window up top and a hinged food slot below. Human cries and pleas echoed up and down the corridors. The place stank of urine, excrement, and fear. It was horrifying to think that human beings were housed here. Thad cringed inside his own skin. Bile bit the back of his throat, and he forced himself not to vomit.

  “What is this place for?” Thad asked faintly.

  “I told you—clockworkers. We leave them in the cells where they cannot hurt anyone and give them materials so they can invent for us until they go mad and must be executed.”

  An automaton shaped like a low cart trundled past. A spindly arm opened the slot at the bottom of a door and shoved a single bowl of what looked like gray porridge through, though Thad could hear multiple voices within the cell. The automaton moved on to the next door.

  “How do they invent anything in here?”

  “Well, we keep them under strict observation, of course. You know that clockworkers can build nearly anything, it seems, given the proper materials, and we limit what they have and how much time they can build.”

  Which explained why Russian automatons were so clumsy compared to those in the West and in China, Thad added to himself. That Russian clockworkers produced anything at all under such conditions was a miracle. Thad didn’t see clockworkers as victims, despite anything Sofiya said, but there was no reason to torture them, either.

  The general took his arm and towed him down the hall. Faces appeared at the tiny windows, some shy and flinching, other imploring. Thad felt sick. “All these people—they can’t be clockworkers. There aren’t this many clockworkers in all Russia, let alone Saint Petersburg.”

  “Of course not,” General Parkarov agreed. “That is why we sent for you.”

  Thad halted between a set of doors. “I fail to understand my role in any of this, sir.”

  “We know a clockworker attempted to assassinate the tsar,” Parkarov explained patiently. “We cannot allow such a monster to run around loose in Saint Petersburg—he might try again, and succeed.”

  “My lords!” cried a man between the bars of his window. “My lords, please! I’m not a clockworker! I’m a simple blacksmith! I’ve never had the plague in my life. I have a wife and four children, my lord. They will starve without me. Please, my lords!”

  “My lords!” cried a woman from her cell. “I am no clockworker! I help my father in his tin shop, but I am no clockworker. I can’t even read! I have done nothing!”

  “My lord…”

  “Please, my lords…”

  “Good God,” Thad breathed. “You rounded up everyone.”

  “Indeed. All we have to do is wait and see which ones go mad. That will show us the clockworker.”

  Revulsion swept over Thad in a black wave. He wanted to run, board a fast train and leave Russia and its lunatic rulers behind forever. Forcibly, he straightened his spine.

  “What do you want from me, then?” he asked, though he was certain he knew the answer.

  The general relit his pipe as if he were in a comfortable study. “With your help, we might find the clockworker more quickly. You’re an expert, after all. Do you see one here?”

  The prisoners continued their piteous wail and cry, and pieces of Thad’s heart broke off every moment he stood in this awful place. It was on the tip of his tongue to say none of them could possibly be a clockworker and that the general should release them all immediately, but he had a strong feeling that this would gain him nothing. The general had made up his mind that a clockworker had tried to kill the tsar and this clockworker was among the prisoners, and he would look until he found one.

  “I saw children among the prisoners in those cages,” Thad said.

  “That is possible.” Parkarov puffed his pipe, adding to the miasma of the dungeon. “My men had instructions to bring in anyone who might possibly be a clockworker—tinsmiths, blacksmiths, watchmakers, machinists, beggars, gypsies, Jews, men who lie with their own sex—”

  Thad thought of Nathan and Dodd. “Why? Beggars and gypsies and…the others? They have nothing to do with machinery.”

  “They spread plague. Everyone knows that. They and their children.”

  “Children are never clockworkers,” Thad said firmly, though he had no idea if that were true. Still, it seemed right enough to get the children out of this place. “The plague does not work that way.”

  “Even when—?”

  “Never,” Thad repeated. “I have made extensive studies, and there is no such thing. You can let every prisoner under the age of…” He pulled a number out of the air. “…sixteen leave.”

  The general nodded. “As you say, then,” though he made no move. A young officer, meanwhile, brought down a desk and set it up in the hall. “You may examine them each from here.”

  “Each?”

  “Yes.” He gestured. The officer, a lieutenant, opened the first cell and dragged out a middle-aged man in a baker’s apron. “We cannot afford to make a mistake.”

  The man fell to his knees before Thad and the general, his eyes filled with terror. “I beg you, sir—” he began.

  Parkarov backhanded the man’s face. “Speak when you are spoken to, dog. Examine him, Mr. Sharpe. Is he a clockworker?”

  Thad made a show of examining the man. He peered into his eyes and ears and even his mouth. He thumped the man’s chest and straightened his arms. At last, he said, “This man is no clockworker.”

  “Are you certain?” asked the general.

  “Positive.”

  The general turned to the lieutenant. “Process this man and release him.”

  “Ser.” The lieutenant returned the relieved-looking baker to his cell and hauled out another man, rather younger. Thad repeated the process and declared the man not a clockworker. And again with a woman, and with a teenaged boy. Each person took considerable time to examine, and the cells down here were filled with people. Through it all, the general puffed his pipe with amused patience. Whenever Thad tried to hurry the process, Parkarov asked questions—was Thad certain? Did all clockworkers fail to present such symptoms? Was it possible Thad was being fooled?
>
  After fewer than a dozen people had gone through the process, they heard the faint boom of the noon cannon far above. Thad jerked his head up from the fruit seller he was pretending to examine. “I have to perform soon,” he said in Russian. “I’m sorry, General, but I’ll have to return later.”

  “Of course, of course. My carriage is at your disposal. Perhaps tomorrow morning we will find the clockworker.”

  Thad glanced down the long corridors of groaning cells, and his heart sank. “I suppose, yes. The tsarina, you know, wanted me to find—”

  “Yes!” Parkarov clapped Thad on the back, a gesture of which he seemed overly fond. “The tsarina. And the tsar. We will do our duty to them both, eh?”

  “Yes,” Thad said with a weak grin. “And with that in mind, I would be in your debt if I could examine a comprehensive map of the city. One that showed any tunnels and accessible underground areas.”

  “Oh well.” The general waved his pipe. “I don’t know if such a map—”

  “There’s one in the offices upstairs,” said the lieutenant helpfully. He was very young for his station and had pale blond hair and brown eyes. “We use it to divide up the city and search for miscreants, just like yesterday. Surely the general remembers.”

  Parkarov shot the lieutenant a look of pure venom, and in that moment, Thad knew. The realization was a bucket of ice thrown over his skin and he almost staggered. Thad recovered himself quickly and said, “Thank you, Lieutenant…?”

  “Markovich, ser.”

  “Lead the way, then, Lieutenant Markovich. Thank you, General.”

  He almost yanked poor Markovich, who would probably spend the rest of his posting in Siberia for his trouble, toward the lift and out of the dreadful dungeon. Thad didn’t want to believe what he had just deduced, but there was no other solution he could see.

  “You must know the general well,” Thad said conversationally as he and Markovich exited the lift.

  Markovich took Thad down a labyrinth of hallways to a room with a bank of pigeonholes, each with a roll of paper in it. He pulled down several sets. “As well as anyone can, I suppose. He is my second cousin, twice removed, on my father’s side.”