The Havoc Machine ce-4

by Steven Harper

  “Drink up, drink up,” Dante squawked.

  “Hm,” Thad said, absently touching Dante’s head. Dante had a point, however accidentally. The men drinking in the tavern had recognized Thad, known what his business was. It wouldn’t take long for word to filter back to Mr. Havoc that Thad was in town. Clockworkers were insane but they were also frighteningly intelligent, and it wouldn’t be much of a strain for for Mr. Havoc to assume that Thad was coming for him and to strengthen his defenses. Hell, he might even attack Thad-or the circus-as a defensive measure. No, Thad would have to take care of Mr. Havoc tonight. Now.

  Thad retrieved his horse from the large, plain tent that housed the rest of the horses, and moments later he was on the road. For a bad moment, clouds rolled across the moon, blocking Thad’s light, but a chilly autumn breeze chased them off again, leaving the path ahead of him as clear as a snake made of mercury. He urged the horse into a canter with Dante clinging to the pommel.

  At a spot where stubbly fields met at a crossroad, Thad saw a horse and rider. His hand went to his revolver, but the figures resolved themselves into Sofiya atop the brass horse, motionless and gleaming beneath the stars. Her scarlet cloak looked like dried blood.

  “What took so long?” she demanded. “I have been waiting forever.”

  Anger stabbed at Thad as he reined in. “Let’s be clear, Miss Ekk. Your presence on this mission is neither required nor desired. If you don’t care for the way I work, you may take back your money and I’ll happily go to bed. Question me again, and that’s what will happen. Is that understood?”

  “Perfectly.” She seemed unruffled. “I was only making conversation.”

  “Pretty boy, pretty, pretty boy.”

  “And keep that walking pile of shit away from Blackie. I don’t want it to contaminate him or me.”

  “Blackie?”

  Dammit. “My son named him.”

  “Ah. And where-?”

  Thad slapped Blackie’s flank, and the horse leaped into a gallop. It was some time before Sofiya and her brass horse caught up. The automaton’s gait was smooth and regular, and it snorted steam from its nostrils at every fourth step. Sofiya didn’t speak again, and eventually Thad was forced to slow Blackie down. Sofiya’s horse matched pace without comment.

  “I am sorry,” Sofiya said at last.

  Thad glanced at her. That was unexpected. But talking with Sofiya was like walking blindfolded through a bomb field. One moment she was explosive, the next she was refined, and he could never tell which was coming. “Sorry for what?”

  “For the death of your son. And, I assume, of your wife. I assume a clockworker was involved.”

  “How did-” He cut himself off. “Never mind. I don’t talk about it.”

  “Nevertheless. It was not my intention to cause you pain, and I apologize. I only want the invention.”

  “And I want the clockworker dead. We can both have what we want.”

  “That would be a small miracle, Mr. Sharpe. But I will settle for Havoc’s machine.”

  Thad shifted in the saddle. “What does this machine do, anyway?”

  “I have no idea. And before you ask, I do not know why our employer wants it, either. That does worry me somewhat.”

  “Oh?”

  “I do not wish to give him a clockworker invention that might hurt a lot of people. So I will have to examine it closely. That is another reason why I am coming along, you see.”

  That surprised Thad. “But you work for him.”

  “And yet I somehow still think for myself. Do you find this so incredible?”

  They reached a village of peasant houses. Like most in this region, the dwellings were low buildings made of logs or sod and topped with thatch. None had windows-they were too poor for that-and no lights burned anywhere. At this time of night, everyone was in bed. Thad judged that they had two or two and a half hours before sunrise. The dirt road threaded between the houses, forked west, and rose up a high hill. Atop the hill, Thad could just make out the silhouette of stone buildings. It seemed to him there should been a storm, or a least a rumble of thunder, but the night was calm and clear.

  As they neared the edge of the village, one of the doors opened a crack and a woman peered out, probably wakened by their hoofbeats. When she saw the direction Thad and Sofiya were heading, she ran out into the road, heedless of her bedclothes and her nightcap.

  “You must not go this way!” she called in desperate Lithuanian. “You must not!”

  Thad halted. “We will be fine, mistress.”

  “No! You must not!” She ran up and caught Blackie’s bridle. He snorted and tried to toss his head, but she clung hard. “That way is the path of a demon!”

  “A clockworker?” Thad asked.

  “An evil man.” Her eyes were pleading. She looked barely older than Thad himself. “He has taken many people from Juodsilai and done terrible things to them. We have begged the Cup Bearer and the Master of the Hunt to help us, but they do nothing. He took my sister…”

  “I am sorry,” Sofiya said for the second time that evening.

  “Vilma!” A man in a nightshirt was standing in the doorway. “Come away!”

  “The demon comes out at night. If you need a place to stay, come to our house. My husband will not like it, but-”

  Thad reached down and gently freed Blackie’s bridle from her hand. “I am not the Master of the Hunt, mistress, but I have come to destroy the demon clockworker.”

  “Death, doom, destruction, despair,” Dante said.

  “Truly?” The woman clasped Thad’s hand and kissed it several times. “Thank you, my lord. Thank you, thank you so much. Wait!”

  The woman dashed past her surprised husband into the house and emerged a moment later with a small jug and a cloth-wrapped bundle. “Take these,” she said.

  Thad recognized both objects by smell. The bundle was rye bread and the little jug contained a homemade vodka strong enough to make his eyes water. He thought about refusing such a rich gift from a poor household, but the woman’s expression was powerfully earnest. Thad also recognized the gesture for what it was. The memory of his own loss made his throat close up as he met Vilma’s eyes. She understood, and turning down her sacrifice was unthinkable. So was refusing to face Havoc.

  “Thank you,” he said. With the gravity of a priest, he slipped the objects into the capacious pockets of his coat. “What was your sister’s name?”

  “Olga.”

  “I will make sure that word is the last sound he hears, Mistress Vilma.”

  Without another word, he turned Blackie and rode away with Sofiya close behind. For once, Sofiya didn’t speak.

  They climbed the hill, which was dotted with birch trees whose bark and leaves turned to silver and paper beneath the moon. Halfway up, Thad dismounted near a birch grove and put Dante on his shoulder. Frost had already killed off the insects, and the birds had migrated long ago, leaving the night eerily devoid of life sounds. Anticipation mingled with uncertainty in Thad’s chest, and he found himself checking his weapons over and over-stilettos, revolvers, bullets, knives, stilettos, revolvers, bullets, knives. He had other equipment as well: silk rope, lock picks, a small hacksaw, matches, and other handy objects. His fingers itched, and he couldn’t sit still. Evil rested at the top of that hill, an evil that terrorized men and killed women’s sisters, and for once Thad would strike it before it struck him.

  “You stay here,” he told Sofiya. “After this point, the horses-and you-will be a nuisance.”

  “As you wish. Perhaps I will nap.” Sofiya made her horse kneel, and she spread her cloak in a half circle in the brass shelter of its body. “Remember, the invention is a spider with ten legs instead of eight and-”

  “-it has strange markings,” Thad finished for her. “I remember.”

  “Sharpe is sharp,” Dante squawked. “Doom!”

  “No talking, bird,” Thad told him, “unless you want Havoc to extract your gears with a spoon.”


  Dante settled his feathers with a clatter, but didn’t respond. Thad touched his knives one more time, then headed up the road toward the ruins and the clockworker named Havoc.

  Chapter Three

  Thaddeus Sharpe scanned the castle ruins with a practiced eye. In his considerable experience, clockworkers liked hidden, enclosed spaces. Castles, sewers, underground rooms, and similar places made them feel safe, like rats in a burrow. Ruins gave them the solitude they often craved; clockworkers did not work well with others. They fell to arguing too easily and tore one another to pieces, sometimes literally. Thad had once managed to set one clockworker on another, and the results had been tremendously satisfying.

  He examined Havoc’s castle from a safe distance, automatically cataloging it and sizing it up. The castle wasn’t a single building, of course. It was a little complex of outbuildings and a main keep bent in a rectangle around a courtyard, all in stony ruins. The keep and some of the outbuildings were surrounded by a fragmented stone wall that had originally been at least three stories tall but was now tumbling down in most places to the point where Thad could probably peer over it on tiptoe. The moat had dried up long ago. Vines crawled over everything, and trees poked through shattered rooftops. It reminded Thad a little of the circus, with a main tent holding court over several smaller ones, except here every shadow held a potential trap. Each hole was also a potential weak spot, and the cracks over there might be good for climbing. Up top, however, the gleam of moonlight revealed toothy spikes poking out of the wall, clear signs of recent human habitation, and Thad was fairly certain that said spikes would be poisoned or otherwise rendered unpleasant. A new portcullis blocked the main gate, and Thad saw no mechanisms for raising it on this side. He would have been surprised to find any. A roofless corner tower about forty yards away had half collapsed, and Thad discarded it as a source of danger, at least from this distance.

  The high stone keep that made up the main building seemed to stare down at Thad from the other side of the wall, while the chill breeze made the trees whisper and mutter among themselves. Thad studied the wall for a long moment, then tossed a broken branch at it. A section of stone the size of a horse slammed down with a bone-jarring thud. It smashed the branch flat into the ground and cranked back up into the wall.

  There was long, long moment of silence.

  “Bless my soul,” Dante whistled.

  Thad sheathed the knife that had sprung into his hand and took a breath to slow his pounding heart. “This place is no circus.”

  “Bless my soul,” Dante repeated. “Applesauce.”

  “Why can’t you say nevermore or something interesting like that?”

  “Applesauce.”

  Thad backed up and edged farther west, away from the tower and the portcullis, his sharp eyes searching the wall.

  “I don’t hear any alarms going off,” he murmured. “Do you?”

  “Nevermore,” Dante said.

  “Right. And we can’t touch the walls, but just around that corner we’ll find a convenient gate half hidden by vines. Do you smell what I smell?”

  “Gingerbread. Gingerbread.”

  “Exactly.”

  A moment later, Thad did find the clump of vines that formed an upside-down U-the overgrown gate Sofiya had mentioned. Standing at what he hoped was a safe distance away, he found a chunk of masonry and flung that at the vines. It vanished through them. Thad waited. Nothing. The safe, untrapped entrance seemed to beckon him in, as if he were child lost in the woods with his sister. The real trap would come later, just as it did with a gingerbread house. Even so, something bothered him, but he couldn’t quite finger it.

  “Dante,” he said at last.

  “Doom,” said Dante. “Death, despair.”

  “Go.”

  “Applesauce,” Dante replied stubbornly.

  Thad plucked the parrot from his shoulder and threw him without ceremony toward the vines. Dante arced sideways into the green curtain with a surprised whistle and vanished. He was too damaged to fly, if he had ever been able to. Thad waited, not sure if he wanted the mechanical bird to disappear forever or not. It might be nice if the universe decided it for him. Thad couldn’t bring himself to believe in God. Not anymore.

  “Dante?” he called.

  Silence. Then another whistle, but muffled somehow. Was that a good sign or bad? Thad couldn’t tell, and the fact that he couldn’t tell made him uncertain and nervous. With a quick gesture, Thad pulled from his pocket a short brass baton. He pressed a button, and it sprang into its full four-foot length with a clack. Cautiously, he used it to push the vines aside. Again, nothing. He moved through the clingy, green-smelling curtain-

  — and nearly fell into a black pit. Thad hung there at the edge like a tightrope walker, not quite falling in but unable to draw himself back. The greedy pit gaped before him, trying to swallow him down. Stones made teeth around the edges, and Dante was grimly holding on to one of them with his beak. Thad hung there, caught between life and death. For a mad moment, he thought about giving up and simply letting himself drop into the dark. It would be easy, and any pain would end quickly. All his pain would end quickly. Then the weight of the vodka jug in his jacket pocket slowly pulled him backward until he regained enough equilibrium to put both feet on firm ground.

  “Idiot,” he muttered to himself. This was what had bothered him-he hadn’t heard the rock hit the ground. He collapsed the staff and returned it to his pocket.

  “Bless my soul.” Dante whistled pointedly from the pit’s edge. Thad picked the parrot up and set him back on his shoulder. Dante bit him on the ear. Pain lanced through Thad’s head, and he felt a trickle of blood.

  “Ow!” Angry, Thad snatched Dante off again and held him over the pit. “Listen, birdbrain, I’ll drop you in, and see if I don’t.”

  “I love you, Daddy. I love you, Daddy.”

  “No, you don’t. And if you say that again without permission, I’ll melt you down in Havoc’s forge while I watch.”

  “Applesauce.”

  “I said, shut it.” But Thad put Dante back on his shoulder again.

  Once he knew the pit was there, it was easy enough to edge around it and onto the grounds of the keep. That brought Thad to one of the long sides of the rectangle that made up the inner castle. Ruined outbuildings backed up against the main wall, and an overgrown courtyard with a well and spaces for gardens spread out ahead of him. Thad flicked a calculating glance at the outbuildings-sometimes clockworkers used what had once been the blacksmith’s forge for their own work-but he saw no evidence of such activity. He sighed. It was too much to hope that Mr. Havoc would be outside, where he would be easy to reach.

  Thad ghosted across the courtyard toward the main building, already falling into a familiar rhythm: dash a few steps, pause, scan for danger, dash a few steps. Stay to the shadows. Watch for anything that glowed or gave off heat.

  A rustling in the grass to his left made the revolver leap into his hand. The hammer clicked under his thumb. Then the shape of a rat skittered away, and Thad relaxed. Dante cocked his head but was wise enough to remain silent.

  Thad oozed up to the main keep, wishing he knew something-anything-about the layout of the interior. Most keeps were built around a main hall, with side chambers for everything from storage to arms to living quarters. Clockworkers needed space, so the main hall was the most likely place to start. One major problem was that clockworkers could-and usually did-go for days without sleeping, so Thad wouldn’t be able to slip up on Havoc while he snored in a bed.

  A number of doors both small and large faced the courtyard. A pair of small ones opened onto the garden area, and the large double doors in the center of the high wall stood shut like pair of giants holding back the darkness. Enormous shiny locks held them closed, and the locks had visible teeth in the keyholes. One keyhole gnashed open and shut with an audible clack even as Thad examined them from several paces back. He didn’t fancy finding a way around that. He glanced up. L
ike most keeps, the windows were high and narrow, more arrow slit than anything. The top floor of the keep had crumbled away, but the lower stories were still solid, and Thad saw no way in besides the doors. Another rat nearly ran over his foot, and he jumped back, suppressing an oath. Dante clacked his beak, but didn’t comment.

  Thad thought a long moment, then went back to the pit and peered into it. It would have to do. He took out the silk rope, tied one end to a sturdy sapling near the edge, and before he could think too hard about what he was doing, he lowered himself down like a mountain climber. The soft silk kept his palms from burning as he slid into the pit’s dark throat, and Thad had to force himself to keep his breathing steady. Dante gripped his shoulder, apparently unconcerned. The descent went on and on. Thad’s muscles ached, and it soon seemed as if he’d been climbing through darkness forever. Sweat trickled from his hair down his collar. The only sounds were his own breath and the little ticks and rustles made as he slid carefully downward, bracing himself against the earthen side of the pit.

  At last the sounds changed. There was that ineffable shift in noise, and he sensed that the bottom of the pit was close under him. Still cautious, he put his feet down even as his forearms and shoulders screamed for mercy, and touched solid floor. He sighed with relief. Something skittered away from him-more rats, no doubt. Thad fished a candle from his pocket and scratched a sulfur match to light it.

  “Bad boy, bad boy,” Dante said softly.

  Thad ignored him and raised the candle. The light revealed a simple earthen pit, as he had been expecting. It also revealed a grated gate set in one wall, as he had been hoping. The padlock that held it shut was simple.

  “Ha,” he said under his breath.

  Havoc hadn’t left the castle gate unsecured in a moment of foolishness, as Sofiya had thought. The crafty bugger had left it open as bait. Thad had seen this kind of thing before. More than one person had used the gate to enter the castle, fallen into the pit, and become fodder for Havoc’s experiments. It was also why there were no alarms or automaton guards-Havoc wanted people to come in. The place was a gingerbread house.