Thad set his jaw, then mounted Blackie ahead of the boy, who still cringed away. “Put your scarf back on, boy.”
Blackie was tired, and the ride back went slower. No one spoke. Sofiya’s face remained pale. The boy held onto the back of the saddle instead of Thad’s waist, and Thad tried to pretend he wasn’t there. When they reached the outskirts of Vilnius, Thad started to turn toward the circus, but Sofiya pulled up short.
“No,” she said. “We must see our employer and explain to him what happened, though I am sure he already knows.”
“He does?” Thad raised an eyebrow. “Then perhaps we should take a nice stroll by the river together first.”
“Sounds wonderful.”
“Or get some breakfast.”
“Equally appealing.”
“But we won’t.”
“No.”
“Because?”
“We are dancing, Mr. Sharpe. He is waiting for us to come and tell him, even though he knows the truth, because he is waiting to see how much truth we tell him. And we must pretend he doesn’t know, and he will act as if he is unaware we are pretending he doesn’t know. Steps within steps, dances within dances, Mr. Sharpe. He likes it that way. In any case, I see no reason for me alone to bring him the bad news when it was your fault.”
“My fault?” Thad shot back. “I didn’t set off the explosive device that destroyed the castle.”
Sofiya shrugged. “Come dance with him, then. I am sure he will understand. In any case, Mr. Sharpe, you may be sure that he is watching, and he is expecting you. If you do not come now, he will send for you later and you will come anyway.”
“Does he employ big men who break thumbs?” Thad touched the pistols at his side.
“No men. And he won’t hurt you, Mr. Sharpe.”
“Then why should I bother seeing him?”
Sofiya halted her horse in the middle of the road, much to the annoyance of the drover in the cart behind her. Thad halted as well. “How many people are in that circus of yours, Mr. Sharpe?”
“What? I don’t know. Sixty, maybe seventy.”
“Close friends?”
“Some closer than others.”
“He won’t hurt you, Mr. Sharpe,” Sofiya said, urging Kalvis forward. “Not if you come.”
“I see,” Thad said tightly.
“Applesauce,” Dante said as they rode into the city. The streets were already filled with morning traffic-horses with carts and women with baskets and men with bundles and children with books. Morning smells of bakery and manure and sewer slops and beer mingled together. Church bells pealed some distance away. Sofiya’s horse attracted glances, but not many-automatons were striking but not unusual.
“Does your parrot talk a lot?” the boy asked as they wove their way up the street.
“Too much,” Thad said. “And I don’t want to hear a great deal from you, either.”
“Bad boy, bad boy,” Dante muttered.
“Tsk!” Sofiya shook her head. “Such a dreadful thing to say to a child.”
“He isn’t a-”
“Ah! Here is the hotel.”
The hotel was wide and stolid, built to endure the steady Baltic winter. They left both horses in the stable next door. Thad was about to order the boy to stay there as well, but Sofiya took his-its-hand with an air of forced no-nonsense and led everyone inside past the desk man to a door on the second floor.
“Stay here,” she said, took a breath, and went into the room beyond. Thad felt guilty, as if he had sent her to take a punishment he himself deserved. Don’t be an idiot, he told himself, and waited in uneasy silence with the boy in the hallway. The floorboards were scuffed but clean, and glass-paned windows at either end of the corridor let in dim light.
“Have you killed a lot of clockworkers?” the boy asked.
“Yes,” Thad replied shortly.
“Is it hard?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you like doing it?”
That question caught Thad off guard. “I don’t know,” he answered without thinking.
“Does it make you happy? Your job is supposed to make you happy.”
“Is it?”
“In a family, the mother stays home to help the children and keep house and the father goes off to work every day, whistling and happy because he likes what he does and he knows he is earning money,” the boy said, ticking off points on his rag-wrapped fingers. “And the children have lessons or an apprenticeship or they play.”
“Do they? And what about poor families, when the father takes whatever work he can, and the mother has to work too, and the children as well?”
“That is very sad,” the boy replied.
Thad stared. “What do you know about sad?”
“It was very sad when Mr. Havoc opened up my head and moved things around. It gave me headaches and made me scared.”
Thad felt his mouth harden into a line. “You are a machine. You can’t feel anything. You can only do and say what Havoc punched into your wheels.”
The boy didn’t respond. He only looked at Thad for a long moment with those enormous eyes, and Thad found he couldn’t meet them. He looked at the door instead.
“Doom,” Dante muttered.
“Shut it, bird.”
“Why do you keep your parrot when he’s broken?” the boy asked suddenly.
“He reminds me of someone I used to know.” Thad’s words were clipped.
“You should fix him. And you shouldn’t be so mean to him. He might leave.”
“He won’t leave. He’s a machine, and he does what he’s told.”
“Applesauce,” said Dante.
The door opened and Sofiya, still looking pale, gestured for them to enter. Thad obeyed with relief-facing this mysterious employer’s wrath felt suddenly preferable to standing alone with the boy.
The chilly room beyond contained a bed, table, and a set of ladder-back chairs. On the table sat a box with a grill on one side and a wire trailing from the back. Several dials and buttons made a row beneath the grill.
Because they weren’t moving, it took Thad a moment to see the spiders.
Dozens and dozens of the them clung to the walls and ceiling. They took up every available inch of space. They ranged in size from ant to dachshund. Some had winding keys sticking out of their backs. Brass and iron claws gleamed. Their eyes glowed blue and red and green, and they were all pointed at Thad.
Cold fear gripped Thad. He stood rooted to the spot a few steps into the room. The boy gasped and hid behind Thad. Even Dante fell silent. Thad couldn’t move, couldn’t think. The quiet menace of all those clawed machines was worse than an army of thugs.
Sofiya coughed hard and gestured at Thad to take a chair. He swallowed hard and forced himself to obey while Sofiya twisted the dials on the box. Thad’s mouth was dry. The boy huddled behind Thad’s chair, trying to stay out of sight. The box squawked, gave a burst of static, then hummed softly. The spiders didn’t move, though their eyes never left Thad. The half dozen weapons he carried felt tiny and childish.
“Mr. Sharpe?” The voice from the box was low and pleasant, almost grandfatherly. “Are you there?”
Thad had to try twice before he could answer. “I am,” he said.
“Good. The connection is excellent. Miss Ekk tells me you failed to do what I hired you to do. I am glad to hear the truth, but I’d like to hear your side of it, of course. We’re all friends here.”
“Are we?” Thad said. “Who am I speaking to?”
“Your employer, of course.” The voice was smooth as chocolate and carried no trace of an accent that Thad recognized. British was all he could make out, but he couldn’t pin down a region.
Thad worked his jaw. “Are you a clockworker?”
“I told you he is stubborn,” Sofiya put in.
“You were quite correct, Miss Ekk. Mr. Sharpe, like you, I take from clockworkers.”
“Take?”
“I take their livelihoods, you take
their lives. Really, we’re quite the same. We both have large collections, for example. What do you think of mine?”
“It takes my breath away,” Thad said. “But you didn’t answer my question.”
A low laugh. “Indeed. I am beyond such classifications, Mr. Sharpe.”
“You are a clockworker, then. Only a clockworker talks that way.” The familiar anger and hatred tinged Thad’s world red.
“You’re rather like a bulldog, Mr. Sharpe. I think I rather like you.”
“Do you?” Thad said through gritted teeth. Right then, he wanted to smash the box and its stupid grill, even though he knew it would do nothing to the man who manipulated it. Already his mind was running in a hundred directions, looking for weaknesses, searching for ideas. But clockworkers were highly intelligent, and Thad’s main strategy for dealing with them was to catch them by surprise, when their intelligence was of little use. This clockworker had taken plenty of time to plan. Thad needed more information before he could act. Best to keep himself under control and see what he could learn.
“What is your name, please?” he said with forced politeness. “Since you do like me.”
“Yes.” A bit of static came over the grill. “You may call me…Mr. Griffin.”
“Pleased to meet you, sir,” Thad said. “I’d shake hands, but you seem to be out of sorts with that.”
“Miss Ekk tells me you brought a mechanical child out of Havoc’s workshop with you,” Mr. Griffin said. “Is it here?”
Thad found himself wanting to correct Mr. Griffin’s use of the word it. “Yes,” he said. “Can you say hello, boy?”
“H-hello.”
The spiders swiveled at the sound of the boy’s voice and stared at him. He made a low sound and tried to huddle under Thad’s chair.
“Then I suppose the night wasn’t a total loss,” Mr. Griffin said. “Should Miss Ekk have the hotel send up something to eat? You must be hungry.”
Now that Mr. Griffin mentioned it, Thad became aware of a gnawing hunger inside him, despite the unease and the spiders. He was also was grubby and dirty from his crawl through the castle and the long ride. He thought of refusing on basic principle, then decided it would be idiotic-and rude-to turn down hospitality, and he didn’t want to be rude to Mr. Griffin right then. Food would also prolong the conversation.
“That would be nice, thank you,” he said.
“Miss Ekk, if you would be so kind? And while you are downstairs, please see to that other errand I mentioned earlier,” Mr. Griffin said from the box. Sofiya quickly exited, and Mr. Griffin’s chocolate voice took on an edge. “As for you, Mr. Sharpe, I would like to hear what happened and why you failed. In detail.”
So Thad told the story. He felt self-conscious talking to a box at first, and the spiders and his anger didn’t help, but it became easier after a while-he could pretend no one was listening but the boy. Through it all, the spiders remained motionless, and Thad relaxed somewhat. A maid brought the food-tea and bread and sausage and butter-and Thad continued speaking between mouthfuls. The boy, of course, had already drunk his fill of fuel some time ago.
When Thad finished, Mr. Griffin said, “I see. I can’t pretend I’m happy, Mr. Sharpe. I needed that machine badly, and you failed me. I had heard you were quite skilled, and it disappoints me to be wrong.”
It was meant to be a rebuke, but Thad didn’t much care what clockworker thought of him. Interestingly, this clockworker didn’t babble or go off on strange tangents like other clockworkers. He also stayed focused on what Thad was saying. Most clockworkers had short attention spans when it came to what other people were saying. Mr. Griffin had neither interrupted nor asked questions during Thad’s recitation. Very strange.
“Look,” he said, “I had no choice but to let the machine go if I wanted to save-”
“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.
“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.
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