The Havoc Machine ce-4

by Steven Harper

  A long pause followed. Sofiya sat perfectly still, the spider still on her neck. Tension lay thick and heavy as sulfur fog in the room.

  “What happened to my spider?” Mr. Griffin asked at last. “My precious little spider?”

  Thad glanced at Sofiya. Her eyes were wide and white. It was his fault she was sitting in the chair with a spider on her neck and a clockworker determined to do something horrible to her. He set his jaw. “I-” he began.

  “I destroyed it,” Sofiya interrupted. “I shot it with an energy pistol.”

  The spiders in the room turned as one to look at her. “And why would you do that to me, Miss Ekk, when I am watching your sister?”

  “It would have given me away.” A calm seemed to have come over her. “So I shot it.”

  Mr. Griffin said, “Interesting. Please put the speaker box on the floor, Miss Ekk.”

  “What are you going to do?” Thad demanded as Sofiya obeyed. Her hands were shaking.

  “I expect my employees to follow my commands. You poked about in forbidden places, destroyed one of my spiders, and tried to cover it up, Miss Ekk. Like a child, there is only one way for you to learn proper behavior.”

  Thad said, “Now look-”

  “Miss Ekk, please give your energy pistol to Mr. Sharpe.”

  Slowly, Sofiya produced the pistol from the folds of her skirt and handed it to Thad. Their fingers touched, and Thad’s eyes met hers. Her face held rigid calm, but her hands were ice cold. She maintained such control. Thad couldn’t imagine how she did it. He felt every spider in the room staring at him.

  “Mr. Sharpe,” said the box, “I want you to shoot one of her hands off.”

  “What?” Thad said in disbelief. “I’m not going to-”

  “Yes, you are, Mr. Sharpe. Miss Ekk cost me a hand, metaphorically speaking, and she will pay for it with one of her own. You were involved in some way, so you will administer the punishment. If you do not, my spiders will take you both apart, and Miss Ekk’s sister, and I will find someone else to work for me.”

  Thad stared at the round little pistol. It crossed his mind to fire it at the spiders, but the pistol only contained one shot at a time.

  “Mr. Sharpe,” said Griffin’s horrible chocolate voice, “if I do not receive payment for my missing hand in three seconds, everyone in that wagon will die. One…”

  Pale and shaking, Sofiya held out her left hand. A small, stupid part of Thad assumed she had chosen her off-hand.

  “Two…”

  Thad held up the pistol. He couldn’t quite comprehend what he was about to do. Guilt and fear, two of his most familiar friends, filled him like sour milk in a glass. Sofiya nodded at him, her eyes never leaving his. His mouth was dry as sand.

  “Three.”

  Thad pressed the barrel of the pistol to his own left palm and pulled the trigger.

  A red explosion of pain ripped through his hand. The pistol clattered away and he dropped to his knees. The tearing, burning agony ran all the way up his arm. A smell of cooked meat permeated the air. Most of his hand was gone. A blackened, pulpy mess that showed yellow bone was all that remained. He had dipped his hand and wrist in molten lead, and the horrible pain consumed his entire being. There was nothing in life but the pain. Flakes of charred skin fluttered to the floor. Thad’s throat was raw from the screaming.

  “An interesting choice, Mr. Sharpe,” said the speaker box.

  Sofiya touched his shoulder. He looked into her calm blue eyes, and then something pricked his arm. She pulled away a long glass syringe. The pain receded a little, and then Thad’s world went dark.

  * * *

  Thad pushed through thickets and dark fog. Voices muttered and groaned like hidden ghosts. His limbs felt heavy, and he struggled to move. His hand hurt. No, it was his wrist. A woman was talking to him, and he fought toward the sound of her voice. At last he managed to pull his eyes open. The fog receded a little, though his vision was still blurry.

  “Can you hear me, Thad?” Sofiya’s accented English carried her worry. “Can you speak?”

  Thad tried, but his tongue felt weighed down with wood chips and stone. He managed to croak, “Thirsty.”

  A cup came to his lips, and he drank cold water. The simple act helped wake him up more and he became aware that he was lying on a pile of quilts atop one of the fold-down shelves in his wagon. Sofiya was sitting next to him. The spiders and speaker box were gone.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Heavy.” His lips were a little numb. “What-?”

  “Try to stay still,” she said. “The opiates should wear off soon, but you will feel their effects for a while.”

  “Where’s Griffin?”

  “He has left. Some men with horses unhooked his boxcars from the train and hauled them away. Do not worry about him right now.”

  Another thought came to him, and this one carried a stab of fear with it. “What about Nikolai?”

  “He’s with the Tortellis. He’s perfectly fine, though he worries about you. Dante watches him.”

  His mind was still blurry. “I can’t-what happened to-?” And then it all came rushing back. The crackle of the pistol going off and the horrible pain. He started to lift his left arm, but Sofiya gently pressed it back down to the bed.

  “I do not know that you are ready for this,” she said. “Perhaps you should wait.”

  Dread drove more of the dizziness away. “Wait for what? I…lost my hand, didn’t I?”

  “You took the shot Mr. Griffin intended for me,” Sofiya said softly. “And you saved my sister. Thank you, Thad.”

  “You only destroyed that spider because I missed it,” he said. “That punishment was meant for me.”

  “I am still grateful.”

  “Let me see,” Thad said. “I want to see.”

  Sofiya nodded and released his arm. Thad raised it. The sensations were strange. It hurt, but not as badly as it seemed it should. He could also still feel his hand in a strange way. He had read of people who had lost limbs being able to feel them. Was it a mangled mess? Or had Sofiya cut it off at the wrist? And how had she done it? Why did she have a syringe and opiates with her? The ache grew more intense when he moved, though there was no trace of the horrible burning he had felt before. He would have to learn how to get along with only one hand. The implications were too powerful for him to think about. He brought his wrist into view.

  He had expected to see a bandage, but metal gleamed at the end of his wrist instead. Thad stared at his new brass hand. The fingers were thin and showed spinning gears at the joints. The hand itself was blocky and sinewy at the same time. Parts of it were covered with brass skin, but most of it revealed the machinery beneath. The hand had been created from one of Mr. Griffin’s spiders.

  “I am sorry for the inelegance,” Sofiya said. “I had to work quickly, with the materials I had at hand. So to speak.”

  Thad turned it back and forth in the light of the lamp that hung from the ceiling. A thick ring of scab and shiny scar tissue encircled his wrist just below the metal. He couldn’t quite take it in. He tried to move. The fingers twitched, spread themselves open, made a fist. The sensation was more than strange. It was like wearing a thick glove that made his hand a little numb and unresponsive, but still his. Then shock overcame him. His skin went cold and he wanted to fling the hand away, but it was attached. His gorge rose and acid burned at the back of his throat. Fortunately, Sofiya had anticipated this and was ready with a basin. When the nauseating spasms ended, she gave him a handkerchief and the cup of water. Automatically he tried to take the latter with his new left hand. The metal fingers clenched around the pottery and shattered it, sending water everywhere.

  “Sorry,” he muttered, blotting ineffectively at the mess with the handkerchief. He was suddenly embarrassed at being in a sickbed in front of Sofiya, especially with her playing nurse. At least he was still wearing his clothes.

  “It is understandable.” She produced a tea towel
to help clean up. “It will take time for you to learn its use.”

  “I can’t seem to-” He stiffened. “You. I didn’t understand before. You forged this hand. Not Griffin.”

  “Yes.”

  “You amputated my original hand and attached this one.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re-”

  “A clockworker. Yes.”

  The signs rushed at Thad like boulders down a mountainside. The agility she had displayed on the train. Her remark about clockworkers not being evil. Her occasionally erratic behavior. Her affinity for Nikolai. The horse and the pistol. He had assumed Kalvis had come from Mr. Griffin, though she had never actually said so, and she had simply lied about buying the gun. His stomach roiled again and he swallowed hard to keep it under control.

  “You’re fil-”

  She held up a hand. “That will keep.”

  “You’re as bad as Griffin.” He thrust out his own hand, the brass one. “You did this to me in order to-”

  “I saved your life because you destroyed your hand for me. Is this something a lunatic would do?”

  He closed his eyes. The world rocked around him, pushing and pulling at him and trying to tip him over while he slid a sword into his throat. He felt for his blades, but they were gone. She had taken them.

  “How is it possible?” he said. “You don’t present like a clockworker.”

  “It is early for me still.” She rested in her chin in her hand. Her fleshy, human hand. “I know what you have been through, Thad. I understand it from the inside. But you cut the world in half with your swords and your knives, and you believe everything must fall on one side or the other.”

  “Clockworkers are monsters.”

  “A clockworker saved you,” she said. “An automaton saved you. What does it take for you to see us as something other than evil?”

  Thad didn’t answer for a long moment. Then he said, “We haven’t heard the end of Griffin, have we?”

  “I doubt it very much. He still needs us for something. Like he needed Havoc’s machine.” She wound a strand of golden hair around her finger. “I was the baby of the family, you know. I had four elder brothers and two elder sisters. My mother was a dairy worker outside of this very city. She knew to make cheese that melted in the mouth. My father, he was often away. There was no work in my village, so he often went to Saint Petersburg. Many men do this, and leave their families unprotected. And still there was little-my family were serfs and most of what we earned went to the landowner in taxes and fees. Ivan and Mikhail, two of my brothers, were conscripted into the army when they were thirteen and fourteen.” Her face grew sad. “I still have not heard what happened to them. They are probably dead, fighting Turks in a foreign war, but no one thinks to write home about the death of a serf.”

  Thad lay without moving. Each word was a tiny nail that pinned him to the bed.

  “There was no money, ever. My mother, she later found work in the landowner’s kitchen as a cook, and then things became a little better. Cooks, of course, can sneak extra food away, and they also have a reputation for being willing to trade their bodies for little gifts from other men.”

  Thad stared at her. “Your mother let men-”

  “Yes, of course.” Sofiya straightened her cloak. “I know that farther west, people find this shocking, but in Russia, it is quite normal. The husbands of the women all know it happens but act as if they know nothing. It became better at home because Mama could sell the things men gave her. And we could eat twice a day.”

  “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. A
nd 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.”