“The island,” he gasped. “They will take the island surrounded by water that runs like silver, and even the cannons won’t touch them.”
Alexei shouted a command at the other automatons. They blinked to life as well, and the court scattered with shouts and squeals. Alexei dodged out of the way as all the automatons converged on their inventor. This time Thad did look away, though he couldn’t close his ears. The clockworker’s screams were mercifully brief, but the awful ripping and tearing sounds went on and on. Thad remembered Blackie. When the automatons backed away, their arms and bodies bloody, there was little left. The court applauded.
“Everyone,” Sofiya said tightly, “loves a circus.”
Thad didn’t respond. The court started the long, involved process of filing out of the grandstand. First the tsarina on the arm of her son, followed by higher-ranking courtiers, then the lower ones. The little automatons zipped about, cleaning up the detritus. The soldiers and servants waited in their places. Behind the grandstand on the road that encircled the Field of Mars, a line of carriages waited to carry the court away.
“Now my favor,” Sofiya said. “The one I asked you to do for me back in the wagon.”
“Oh.” Nonplussed, Thad flexed his new hand again. “What is it?”
“Before that happens to me,” she nodded at the mess on the field, “I wish for you to promise you will cut my throat first.”
Thad looked at the red mess on the Field beside the golden cage. With no one to command them, the automatons had gone motionless again. Overheard circled a pair of ravens. He shuddered and averted his eyes. “I understand. I can’t say it’ll be my pleasure, but I’ll do my best.”
“Thank you.” She squeezed his arm again. “Nikolai has been worried about you. We should go to him.”
“Where is he?”
“Probably in the Tilt.”
* * *
The Tortellis were flying in the rigging high overhead, and Thad and Sofiya arrived in the Tilt just in time to see Loreta Tortelli, her dark hair pulled into tight braids around her head, somersault twice in midair. Her father Alberto caught her wrists with a slap of flesh on flesh.
“Tighter next time!” called her mother, Francesca, from the platform in Italian. “You almost didn’t make the turn.”
To one side, Hank and Margaretta Stilgore were working on their stilt walker act in full costume. They played caricatures of a businessman and his wife. Long trousers and skirts hid the stilts, making their legs look garishly long. Hank strode about with a cane the length of a harvesting rake while Margaretta had one of Tina McGee’s poodles on a very long leash. Mordovo sat in the grandstand wearing his long coat. He flicked his hand and a playing card appeared in it. He flicked it again and the card vanished. Mordovo shook his head, flicked his hand again. A line of twelve white horses trotted in through the front entrance. They entered the ring and went into what looked to Thad like a perfect canter around the ring, though the girl standing in the center with a long buggy whip occasionally tapped one to make corrections. There was a tension in the air. Only a few days ago in Vilnius, they’d been barely putting cheeks on the boards, as Thad’s father liked to say. Now they had to be up for performing for the tsar of all Russia. Thad wiggled his new hand. He was both disappointed to miss the opportunity and glad he didn’t have to worry about it.
They found Nikolai sitting on Kalvis, the mechanical horse, with Dante perched on the horse’s withers. Nikolai was drinking a bottle of whisky and watching the rehearsals. Next to him on the horse’s back was what looked like a peanut bag. He had taken off his hood and scarf. His half-mechanical, half-human face sent a squirm down Thad’s spine, and he wanted to tell the boy to cover up. But no one else seemed to care. They knew who-what-Nikolai was, so what as the point? It still felt wrong to Thad, and he felt oddly guilty that it felt wrong, and once again he found himself caught between opposing emotions. He didn’t care for the sensation.
Kalvis was fully polished, and his brassy skin gleamed like gold. Steam snorted from his nostrils, and he raised his head when Sofiya came near.
“Did you miss me, my magnificent one?” she asked him in Russian, and Kalvis snorted more steam.
Dante caught sight of Thad. He bobbed up and down. “Bless my soul! Bless my soul!”
“You’re awake!” Nikolai slid from Kalvis’s back and dashed to him, peanut bag in one hand, whisky bottle in the other.
Without thinking, Thad picked him up and swept him into the air, just like he would have David. Nikolai laughed in his perfect little boy voice. Then Thad realized what he was doing, and quickly set him down.
“I’m glad you came awake,” Nikolai said. “It made me nervous that your hand was chopped off and you wouldn’t wake up, even when you got your new one.”
“I’m fine now,” Thad said, a little disgruntled, though he wasn’t sure whom he was disgruntled toward. Then he said, “Are you taller?”
Nikolai shrugged, emptied the whisky bottle down his throat, and shoved it into his pocket. Thad put a hand on Nikolai’s head and measured him against his own body, trying to remember exactly how tall the boy had been before.
“Is he taller?” Thad asked Sofiya, who was cooing at Kalvis. “How is that possible?”
“I did not build him.” Sofiya draped her scarlet cloak across Kalvis’s back. “You are a fine, fine horse. Yes, you are. Yes, you are. And we are going to ride for the tsar. And he will shower us with praise and riches and you will have all the paraffin oil you can burn. Yes, you will.”
“How long was I asleep?” Thad asked. With all that had happened, it hadn’t occurred to him to ask yet. Automatically, he plucked Dante from Kalvis’s back and set the parrot on his shoulder. Dante nibbled with apparent affection at Thad’s cheek, then abruptly bit his ear. Thad knocked him on the head with a knuckle and Dante subsided.
Nikolai fished a pair of brass nails out of the peanut bag and popped them into his mouth. He crunched loudly. “You slept three days and three nights and part of today.”
“Three days?”
“It was a long time.” Nikolai crunched more nails.
Thad said automatically, “Don’t talk with your mouth-wait a moment! Are you eating?”
“Yes. I like the brass ones best. The iron ones don’t taste very nice, but they are good for me.”
“Doom,” Dante said.
All the strength drained out of Thad’s legs. He staggered to the grandstand to sit down. Nikolai came with him, crunching more nails. “Sofiya, I’ve never seen an automaton eat anything and grow from it. Is this-?”
Sofiya leaped gracefully onto Kalvis and held her body parallel to the horse’s back on her hands alone. Then she did a complicated little flip that landed her in a sidesaddle position. Nikolai applauded.
“Oh no,” Thad said. “You are not doing what I think you are doing. Actually, I know what you’re doing, and you’re not doing it.”
Sofiya laughed. “I am doing exactly what you do think I am doing.”
“No,” Thad repeated.
“Yes! It will be fun.”
“Did we not just watch a clockworker put to death?”
“Everyone loves a circus,” she said. “Look around you.” The stilt walkers were dancing a giraffe’s waltz while the poodle yipped at their feet. Loreta Francesca hung by her teeth from a bar and whirled in a dizzying spin. Mordovo conjured bright handkerchiefs out of nothing. “Who would think to find a clockworker performing acrobatics with her clockworker strength and clockworker reflexes among people such as this?”
“I want to perform too,” Nikolai said.
Thad felt the situation getting away from him. “You do? And what can you do, then?”
In answer, Nikolai produced from his rags one of Thad’s long daggers. Before Thad could react further, Nikolai tilted his head back. With a faint squeak, his head and his jaw flipped apart so wide, his forehead and chin were nearly touching his back and chest. Nikolai thrust the dagger point-first down
his metallic throat with a clink, then pulled it back out again. His head snapped back to its normal position.
Dante whistled. “Bless my soul.”
“Ta da!” said Nikolai.
There was a moment of silence. Then Thad burst out laughing. He couldn’t help it. Days of tension and terror, stress and strain rushed out of him like fireworks, and he laughed and laughed and laughed. He laughed until his stomach hurt and tears streamed from his eyes. He tried to wipe them away, and noticed he was trying to do so with a brass hand. That struck him as even funnier, and fresh gales swept over him.
Sofiya regarded him from her horse. “I think maybe this one is ready for the automatic cage.”
“Doom,” said Dante.
“It wasn’t meant to be funny,” Nikolai said petulantly. His face, his strange little face, looked serious, even hurt. Thad tried to get himself under control and finally managed it with some effort.
“I’m sorry, Niko,” he said, and ruffled the boy’s hair with his brass hand. “But I don’t think that will fly in the ring.”
“Why not?” He still sounded unhappy.
“A circus act is all about doing the impossible or unexpected,” Thad explained. “Look up there in the rigging. No one expects human beings to move like that. It almost seems as if they can fly. And look at Mr. and Mrs. Stilgore over there. No one expects people to have such long legs or to be able to walk about on stilts like that. Men also don’t toss torches about or breathe fire.”
“Or swallow swords,” Nikolai put in.
“Or swallow swords,” Thad agreed. “And you’ll notice that all these acts are more than a little dangerous. That’s why people come, really. They’re hoping to see a stilt walker trip or a flyer fall or a fire eater burst into flame or a sword swallower slice himself in two. They want to see a lion eat the tamer or a horse girl break a leg or the elephant boy get trampled. They wouldn’t say that and they’d deny it if you asked, but that’s why they come, nonetheless.”
“So I can’t swallow swords because that won’t hurt me.”
“Now you have it.”
“How do you stay safe, then?”
“There are two tricks to that.” Thad looked into the distance. “One is to make what you’re doing look more dangerous than it is.”
“What’s the other?”
“Don’t stay safe.”
Nikolai thought about that. “I understand. Thank you for the nickname and the papa lecture.”
“What?” Thad stared at him.
“You taught me something and you gave me the nickname Niko. That is what papas do. I think you are doing a wonderful job. Especially because you didn’t die.”
“He has you,” Sofiya said gaily. “Why don’t you run down to the bath tent now, dear? As Niko points out, it has been more than three days, and you are rather ripe.”
“Oh no-we aren’t heading in that direction. No dear, no darling, no sweetie. This isn’t a marriage, even of convenience.”
“It is anything but convenient,” Sofiya agreed.
* * *
The machine had grown enormously larger. It had added thousands of tiny memory wheels to itself, and found itself able to understand more and more without the signal’s help. It learned how to expand the limited capabilities of its tiny receiver and listen to other signals that expanded its knowledge further. It captured a spider and ordered it to run a wire up to the delicious and intricate web of metal that ran above it, and suddenly the machine was exposed to trillions of dots and dashes that carried information of all sorts. It shivered once, and a signal of its own rippled throughout the city above. The wire signals fell silent for a few seconds, then came alive with frantic chatter as the operators asked themselves what had happened, who had sent the rogue signal, how it would be investigated. Some time later, an admonishing signal came from the Master, ordering the machine not to tamper with the telegraphs again, lest it draw attention to itself, and the machine obeyed. It did not care one way or the other.
The machine had only one imperative: improve its own operation. It cared about nothing else, had no real mind or thought. It did as the Master said and carried out its orders.
To that end, it captured another of the Master’s spiders and sent it up to a thing called an engineering library in the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which was almost directly above it on the place called Vasilyevsky Island across the River Neva and near another place called the Field of Mars and the Kalakos Circus.
Thoughts of the circus awakened a small independent sensation in the machine. It felt a…longing. A desire. A want. The machine was indeed familiar with desire. It desired metal to build new parts so it could expand and improve itself. It desired to follow the Master’s orders as transmitted by the signal. It desired knowledge, also to improve itself. But those desires were all directed toward the machine’s directive of self-improvement. This desire was for something else, a desire the machine could not yet name.
The machine would have to improve itself to the point where it could do so.
Chapter Nine
Thad pulled on fresh trousers, then looked at himself in the full-length mirror inside the door of the wardrobe in his wagon. Atop it was his bed, the one his parents used to sleep in and which he now used. Beside him on the wall hung his collection of clockwork trophies. They seemed forlorn now instead of menacing. The blank eyes of one of the automaton heads looked more reproachful than glassy. Maybe it was time to take them down. Beneath them, the fold-down shelf Sofiya had put him on was still piled up with dirty quilts. He had slept on that shelf as a very small boy, though in later years his parents had acquired a tent that draped over the front of the wagon to effectively double the living space, and Thad had slept on a camp bed out there.
His hair was still damp from the bath, and he had even managed a shave. He was reaching for a fresh shirt when he caught his reflection in the mirror inside the wardrobe door. The brass hand gleamed at the end of his wrist. It looked strange against his bare skin. Cautiously, he held it up. In the mirror, his reflection did the same. Thad had a long, lean build, and his muscles were tightly corded, every one etched with acrobatic precision. The hand, in contrast, was spiky and uneven. The cogs spun smoothly, but they showed through, pulling on the wires that served as tendons. He ran a finger down his forearm, feeling the normal slide of his fingertip on his skin, until he met metal a few inches below where his wrist had been, and the sensation ended. He rapped on the hand with a knuckle. That he felt, more or less, though it could have just been vibrations transmitted to his wrist. Impulsively, he stuck a metal finger in the candlestick burning on the nearby table. At first he felt nothing. Then a rising heat came, and actual pain. He snatched his finger back, but the metal didn’t cool down quickly. Hissing through his teeth, he plunged the finger into the water pitcher. A faint psst rose from the liquid. The pain stopped.
“Sharpe is sharp,” said Dante. “Bad boy, bad boy.” He was chinning himself upside down on a perch cobbled together from a pair of oaken ax handles and hung from the ceiling. The handles had deep beak marks all over them. Thad would have to build a new one soon. He was privately certain that if he left Dante alone with a block of marble, he would return to find a pile of stone chips and a cheerful parrot.
“You are asking for trouble, birdbrain.” Thad shook the water from his hand, and the fingers clattered together like Dante’s dented feathers. There was still a delay between the time he wanted his hand to do something and the time it obeyed. He held it up one more time, turning it this way and that. It was better than losing a hand entirely, but…he had lost a hand. He couldn’t throw knives with it, swallow swords, or perform sleight of hand. He was a cripple. Half a man.
Stop it, he told himself. Many people go through much worse. You just need practice. You’re fine.
He didn’t feel fine.
“Doom,” said Dante from his perch.
“Shut it!” Thad snapped at the parrot’s reflection in the m
irror. Then Thad paused. Something was off. He pulled open the other half of the wardrobe. Instead of his collection of weapons, he found more clothing. Women’s clothing-dresses and skirts and petticoats and blouses. Below them were folded a small stack of ragged shirts which looked to fit a small boy. For a terrible moment of hope, Ekaterina and David were alive again, their clothes in the wardrobe where they belonged. Then the thought fled. Sofiya must have put these here, and she had moved his weapons to do so. Annoyed, Thad flicked through the hanging articles. One of them felt heavy in the wrong place. Curious, he felt around. From the pocket of one skirt, he drew a photograph in a small frame. It was of a young woman, quite pretty, with long hair and wearing a pale dress. The family resemblance to Sofiya was unmistakable. The woman was sitting next to a spindly table that held a vase with flowers in it. It took Thad a moment to realize that the woman’s chair had wheels, and that only one shoe peeped out from under her skirts. She was missing a leg.
Thad examined the picture more closely. Sofiya had mentioned her sister Olenka as a survivor of the clockwork plague, and the plague often crippled survivors, though as far as Thad knew, it twisted or paralyzed limbs. It didn’t cause them to fall off, except in people who became zombies. Perhaps an overeager physician had decided to amputate. In any case, it explained some of Sofiya’s reluctance to talk about her sister.
He slipped the photograph back into its place, pulled out one of his own shirts, and shook it out. Where had she put his weapons? It bothered him a great deal that she had not only touched them, but moved them where he couldn’t find them.
“Dammit, Sofiya!” he muttered.
“Yes?” she said behind him.
He dropped the shirt and spun around, automatically snapping out his hands for his knives, but the brass one fumbled, and the spring-loaded sheaths weren’t fitted to his forearms in any case. He got himself back under control.
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