The Havoc Machine ce-4

by Steven Harper

  One of the spiders got past Thad and reached his shoulder. Dante bit it in half and spat it away. “Applesauce! Doom!”

  The tsar recovered. Without a word to either Thad or Sofiya, he vaulted over the front of the grandstand and landed six feet below on the Field of Mars, whereupon he sprinted for the barrack. Three more havoc spiders crawled up Thad’s legs. Only a few steps away, the tsar nearly ran straight into General Parkarov.

  Time slowed. Thad grabbed havoc spiders and threw them down. They tore his clothes as they came away. Parkarov drew a knife. The tsar saw it. His eyes met Parkarov’s. Alexander’s expression was calm, almost serene. He knew he was going to die. Thad tried to grab his pistol again, but the spiders had delayed him. Parkarov’s arm came forward.

  A red bolt of energy cracked past his shoulder. It struck Parkarov full in the temple. His head vanished in a small explosion of heat and red light. Parkarov’s body stiffened, then dropped to the ground, trailing smoke from the neck. Both Thad and the tsar turned. Sofiya brandished her little energy pistol.

  “Nice shot,” Thad said.

  “The tsar agrees with you,” Sofiya replied. A havoc spider skittered up the back of her dress, but Maddie attacked it, and it dropped away. “We shouldn’t stay here. These spiders are attacking everything mechanical, and we’re carrying machinery.” She stomped on one even as she spoke.

  The court had nearly emptied the grandstand by now, and they added a dash of color to the throng outside the grandstand. The spiders were busy dismantling everything mechanical they could get their claws on-soldier weapons, automatons, lampposts, engines on automated carriages. They devoured machines like locusts in a wheat field. They didn’t seem to be hurting actual people, though a number of them had been trampled, possibly even killed, in the panic that was still ongoing. The crowd to flee, but there was nowhere to flee to.

  “How is this happening?” Thad said. “Havoc couldn’t have lived. Did his machine survive and somehow come along on-”

  “The circus!” Sofiya finished. “It somehow got on the train in Vilnius, and now it’s eating mechanicals to make copies of itself here. But why?”

  “Griffin!” Thad said grimly. “He arranged this from the start. It’s why he wanted me to hire the circus for him.”

  Sofiya met his horrified eyes as the same awful thought crossed both their minds. “Nikolai!”

  They shoved their way through the crowd. Sofiya became a snarling tiger, all but throwing people aside and bolting ahead. Thad found himself following her, though he also shoved aside people with a strength he didn’t know he possessed. They finally cleared the crowd and sprinted for the circus.

  “Kalvis, too,” Sofiya said as they ran. “Oh God.”

  “Death!” screeched Dante, clinging madly to Thad’s coat. “Doom!”

  Thad tightened his jaw and ran. Every muscle in his body bunched. His nerves hummed like cello strings. Every step brought him closer, but every step also seemed so damned slow. They reached the outer boundary of tents. The circus was also in disarray. The havoc spiders were climbing over everything, hunting for machinery. Performers and roustabouts fought back. A group of them had already formed up around the locomotive to beat them away, and Dodd and Nathan were fighting off another flock farther back at the Black Tent. Mama Berloni crushed one with a frying pan. Piotr the strongman picked them up and yanked their legs off. Dodd smashed others with a sledgehammer, but still they came. Thad and Sofiya ignored all this and ran past them to the wagons. Thad’s heart was in his mouth. The wagons were blurry, and he was running through the streets of Warsaw again, searching for David. But it wasn’t David. David was dead. He was going after Nikolai.

  Two spiders were just finishing off the hinges on the door to Thad’s wagon when they arrived. The door fell off, and a swarm of spiders poured in through the opening. Rage poured over Thad, and he actually pulled ahead of Sofiya. Beside the wagon, Kalvis was bucking and stomping. Havoc spiders were trying to crawl up his legs, and he was shaking them off to trample them. A little boy’s scream came from inside the wagon, and Thad’s heart stopped.

  “I have Niko,” he shouted. “Get the horse!” And he dove into the wagon without waiting for a reply.

  Inside, Nikolai was backed up against the wardrobe. Spiders covered his face and body. Thad bellowed something inarticulate and bolted for him. He tore a havoc spider off with each hand and flung them away, then grabbed two more and two more. Nikolai continued to scream and the sound put Thad right back in Power’s laboratory, and this time, this time, no one was going to die because he hadn’t arrived in time. But every time he pulled a spider off, another one crawled up to take its place. Nikolai screamed and screamed. Thad ripped spiders off with his hands, crushed them with his feet, and still they came. He grabbed the water pitcher and dowsed the spiders with it. The ones on Nikolai’s body made spitting noises and dropped motionless to the floor, but others leaped to take their places and now the pitcher was empty. Still Nikolai screamed. Dante leaped onto Nikolai’s shoulder and flung spiders away with his powerful beak. Thad didn’t know what to do except keep pulling.

  “I’ve got you, Niko!” he said. “I won’t let them-”

  And then the spiders fled. As one, they ran down Nikolai’s body, out the door, and away. Nikolai stopped screaming. He stood there, dripping wet, his mechanical face and too-human eyes staring up at Thad in disbelief for a long moment.

  Dante jumped to his perch. “Bless my soul.”

  Thad grabbed Nikolai by both shoulders, and a small, stupid part of him noticed that Nikolai was indeed taller. “Are you all right?”

  He looked at Thad for another moment, then slowly nodded. “They didn’t hurt me. They just crawled on me. What were they?”

  “They didn’t hurt you at all?” Weak with relief and unwilling to examine that relief too closely, Thad checked over Nikolai, but found nothing wrong-no tears or gouges out of him, nothing missing. No problems at all.

  Dante coughed up a spider leg. It clattered to the floor. “Death!” he said with satisfaction. “Doom!”

  “I was so scared,” Nikolai said. “I thought they were going to kill me.”

  “They didn’t,” Thad said. “And…and you can’t really die anyway, so…” Why was he saying this?

  “You’re supposed to embrace me,” Nikolai said.

  “Am I?” Thad said.

  “That’s what-”

  “A papa does, yes.” Thad sighed. The worst of the tension had lifted and things were returning to…well, he couldn’t call it normal. Usual, perhaps.

  “So, then?” Nikolai held up his arms.

  Thad suddenly didn’t know how to respond. He felt uncomfortable again, and caught between Nikolai the machine and Nikolai the little boy. His brass hand felt heavy. And then something else struck him. What had happened to Sofiya and Kalvis?

  “Wait here!” he said to Nikolai, and dashed to the door to look outside.

  Sofiya and Kalvis were gone.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Sofiya Ivanova Ekk saw the spiders abruptly rush away. A few remaining ones, injured by Kalvis’s hooves, tried to flee as well, but only managed a slow drag. Inside the wagon, Nikolai’s screams ended. Sofiya, her dress torn and her feet sore, gave Kalvis a split-second check to see if he were all right-he had a few nicks and scratches, but otherwise seemed fine-before running to the wagon. Inside, Thad was kneeling in front of little Nikolai to examine him.

  “They didn’t hurt me,” Nikolai was saying. “They just crawled on me. What were they?”

  The little one was safe. Kalvis was safe. Sofiya wanted to collapse with relief, but she didn’t dare, not yet. The spiders were getting away, and she couldn’t let this chance pass by. Thad could stay with Nikolai.

  With Maddie still clinging to her shoulder, Sofiya leaped onto Kalvis’s saddle broad back and he bolted forward, following the trail of mechanical spiders. The brass horse leaped over tent ropes and wagon tongues and once even a person. Sofiy
a followed his movements with ease. It was both frightening and exhilarating, having these strange abilities. It was as if someone had handed her the rule book for the universe. Every object around her was reduced to its component mathematics at a glance-weight, volume, inertia, trajectory. She could calculate with a razor’s precision where to throw, how high to jump, when to shove. Her own body had become a series of levers and wedges. The new strength was nearly more than she could contain.

  But contain it she did. The world was also full of enticements: elements to combine into new configurations; little parts to build into large engines; small ideas to expand into enormous ideas. She didn’t dare explore them. This new precision of body and intellect also etched into her mind the memory of looking down at the mangled body of her dear sister, the awful look of pain as Olenka awoke, the terrible feeling of fear and betrayal in her sibling’s eyes. Sofiya remembered every bit of black, crushing guilt, and she swore that she would fight the clockworker fugues from then on. She wasn’t always successful. Kalvis. The energy pistol. Thad’s hand. Nikolai’s head. She remembered very little of the building fugues, and Thad swore she hadn’t hurt him during the latest one, but she spied the bruises, and she noted him limping when he thought she couldn’t see, and the thought that she could have done worse made her shake inside.

  Thad had saved her more than once, and even though she had similarly saved him, she felt guilty for bringing him into Mr. Griffin’s web in the first place. Thad was a fine man, very handsome with his dark hair and whipcord build, and the clockwork part of her mind had taken a thrill out of putting her hands on him during the operation, feeling how his muscles and bones went together. She had initially gotten a perverse pleasure in teasing him, tricking what she had taken to be a foolish, cruel man who hunted clockworkers into working with one. For one. But the more time she had spent with him and the more she had learned about him, the more she understood him, saw that his misery was similar to her own. It was painful to watch the way he tried to keep a wall between himself and Nikolai.

  Nikolai. He had also started as a way to annoy Thad. At first she had found amusing the little automaton’s insistence that they were a family, and she had gone out of her way to push him and Thad together, force the man who killed clockworkers to confront a clockwork invention. How she had laughed over that! As a clockworker herself, she would have no trouble remaining aloof, seeing Nikolai as nothing but a machine. How foolish. But at least she had come to accept the way she now saw Nikolai. Thad was another matter.

  When Sofiya was not much older than Nikolai looked, she had found a thin, starving tabby cat lost in a wheat field and brought it home. Papa had refused to let it in the house and told Sofiya to drown it in the river. But Sofiya took the cat to the barn, and when Papa saw her catch and kill a rat, he grudgingly allowed her to stay-as long as she continued to catch and kill rodents. Never, however, was anyone allowed to feed her or waste time playing with her. Some months later, Sofiya caught Papa rubbing the cat’s ears and slipping her some scraps from the slop bucket. Papa huffed away to finish feeding the pigs when he noticed Sofiya watching him, and neither of them mentioned the incident. But two years later, when a horse accidentally kicked the cat and killed her, Papa hid in the barn and wouldn’t come out for more than an hour. Thad reminded Sofiya of Papa.

  No, Thad was a good man, despite his bloody past, and Sofiya felt a twinge of guilt when she thought of what she had done to him. Guilt was, in fact, the most familiar of all Sofiya’s emotions, and when that burden became too heavy, she did fantasize about letting go, becoming a complete madwoman, no matter what Thad said. It might be nice to remain utterly selfish, not caring about anyone or anything else.

  Kalvis galloped onward, leaping and snorting steam as he went. Maddie hunkered down for the ride. A silly name for a spider, but Thad had allowed her to name Nikolai, so she supposed he must take a turn. The crowd at the Field of Mars had managed to flee, and the place was nearly empty but for the gallows and the grandstand. A scattering of havoc spiders scuttled toward the pontoon bridge at the far end, and Sofiya urged Kalvis to greater speed. She could catch them, find out where they had come from, but they had to hurry. Chilly autumn air rushed past her face, and Kalvis’s hooves thudded on hard earth.

  At the pontoon bridge, the one that crossed the River Neva past the Peter and Paul Fortress to Petrogradsky Island, the trail of spiders turned left-west-and skittered downstream behind the Winter Palace to a different bridge seven or eight blocks away. That bridge, Sofiya recalled from Thad’s maps, crossed to Vasilyevsky Island, the other large island of Saint Petersburg. Thoroughly mystified now, Sofiya urged Kalvis to follow. The horde of havoc spiders, now in a variety of colors, but all with ten legs, crossed the bridge with a deafening click of metal claws on wood. Traffic had already fled the pontoon bridge. Sofiya let the last of them get halfway across before she herself set out.

  Vasilyevsky Island was large enough that it didn’t feel like an island. The western half was taken up by shipping docks. The eastern tip, where Sofiya crossed, was buildings of brick and stone and a mix of paved streets and muddy byways. The northern side was still damp forest. The island was inhabited only by the wealthy, those who served them, and by people connected to the museum and the Academy of-

  Sofiya bit her hand. Of course! Now she knew where the spiders had come from-and where they were going. The Russian Academy of Sciences was one of the few areas in Saint Petersburg with a network of tunnels and subcellars beneath it. That, and the resources of the Academy, made it the perfect place for a clockworker to hide. Thad had even circled it on the maps. They would have investigated it earlier if it had also included a railroad spur.

  The havoc spiders continued on their way. The army would have been following them, except they were occupied in keeping order in the city and protecting the tsar. It seemed to be up to Sofiya. The spiders completely ignored everything around them now. Word seemed to have spread about the disaster, and the streets were empty. Every door was shut, every window shuttered. It felt eerie to ride her clockwork horse down silent, empty streets in broad daylight.

  Around a corner, she came to the Academy, a series of buildings that bent together in a giant triangle around a courtyard. The Academy buildings were stony and colonnaded, just like the barrack at the Field of Mars, and four stories tall. The havoc spiders had found a downward staircase cut into one side of a wall. It ended in a heavy door that was propped open, and the spiders scuttled through. Did anyone else see this through shutter cracks and window curtains?

  Heart pounding, Sofiya dismounted, told Kalvis to stay, and crept down the stony stairs to the door. It creaked open, and Maddie echoed the sound.

  “Hush,” Sofiya told her, wondering if this was how Thad felt about Dante. That poor bird-forced to exist in a half-broken state. She could see in her head how to repair his gears properly, fit new feathers into place, perhaps even allow him to fly. She could-

  Concentrate. She had to concentrate.

  The hall beyond was dark and damp. Sofiya slipped inside, nervous but determined. Thad wasn’t the only one who could track down rogues. Ahead of her from around a corner came a blue luminescence that wobbled up and down. Sofiya peeped around the wall and saw the havoc spiders each exuding a tiny tendril with a glowing bit of phosphorescence at the end. Maddie squeaked excitedly in her ear. There was a pop, and the little spider showed a glowing tendril of her own.

  “Thank you, little one,” Sofiya murmured.

  The havoc spiders filled the tunnel ahead, on walls and floor and ceiling, all marching steadily toward a goal only they understood. They hadn’t hurt any humans back in the city and even now they seemed perfectly content to ignore Sofiya, but it seemed prudent to keep her distance anyway.

  The tunnels beneath the Academy were labyrinthine. Sofiya followed spiders and wound her way under low ceilings and through grates and down staircases. The chill, damp air invaded her lungs, and the incessant skritching sound of the
spiders’ claws on stone filled her head with sand. Sofiya’s treacherous brain automatically calculated how deep she had gone, how many tons of earth pressed down above her, how much weight the stones in the walls were bearing. Thad had said this sort of place should make her feel secure, but it only made her feel ill. To take her mind off it all, she took out her energy pistol and cranked the tiny generator to power it back up again.

  At last she heard a different sound ahead, the sound of large machines whirring and clanking and thumping. The havoc spiders went down a final staircase and vanished, taking their glow with them and leaving Sofiya in a tiny pool of blue light surrounded by utter darkness. The machine sounds clanked up the stairs at her like an angry factory. Sofiya did not want to go down those stairs. Her heart beat hot in her chest, and every nerve in her body screamed at her to run. But she had to know what-who-was down there. Mouth dry, blood pounding in her ears, she forced herself down the spiral steps.

  The angry machine sounds grew louder, and the blue glow became visible again from a space beyond the bottom. Maddie shivered. Her light went out. Sofiya pressed her back to the staircase stones and carefully peered around the final bend.

  In the large room beyond stood an enormous machine, the like of which Sofiya had never dreamed. Conveyer belts and hoppers and metal arms and pistons and riveters and air hammers and objects Sofiya had no name for whirled and hissed and popped and hummed. Thousands of havoc spiders wandered about the room, covering every available surface. Attached in center of it all, much like Mr. Griffin’s glass jar, sat a larger version of the spiders, one with intricate etchings all over it. Incongruously, next to the spider sat a small silver chair.