Leviathan

THIRTEEN

Walking through the town of Lienz, Alek’s skin began to crawl.

He’d seen markets like this before, full of bustle and the smells of slaughter and cooking. It might have been charming from an open-air walker or a carriage. But Alek had never visited such a place on foot before.

Steam carts rumbled down the streets, spitting hot clouds of vapor. They carried piles of coal, caged chickens screeching in chorus, and overloaded stacks of produce. Alek kept slipping on potatoes and onions that had spilled onto the cobblestones. Slabs of raw meat swung from long poles that men carried on their shoulders, and pack mules prodded Alek with their loads of sticks and firewood.

But worst of all were the people. In the walker’s small cabin he’d grown used to the smell of unwashed bodies. But here in Lienz hundreds of commoners packed the Saturday market, bumping into Alek from all directions and treading on his feet without a murmur of apology.

“THE STREETS OF LIENZ.”

At every stall people yammered about prices, as if obliged to argue over every transaction. Those that weren’t bickering stood around discussing trivialities: the summer heat, the strawberry crop, or the health of someone’s pig.

Their constant chatter about nothing made a certain sense, he supposed, as nothing important ever happened to common people. But the sheer insignificance of it all was overwhelming.

“Are they always this way?” he asked Volger.

“What way, Alek?”

“So trivial in their conversation.” An old woman bumped him, then muttered a curse under her breath. “And rude.”

Volger laughed. “Most men’s awareness doesn’t extend past their dinner plates.”

Alek saw a sheet of newsprint fluttering underfoot, half ground into the mud by a carriage wheel. “But surely they know what happened to my parents. And that war is coming. Do you suppose they’re really quite anxious, and only pretending not to worry?”

“What I suppose, Your Highness, is that most of them cannot read.”

Alek frowned. Father had always given money to the Catholic schools, and supported the idea that every man should be given a vote, regardless of station. But listening to the prattle of the crowd, Alek doubted that commoners could possibly understand affairs of state.

“Here we are, gentlemen,” Klopp said.

The mechaniks shop was a solid-looking stone building on the edge of the market square. Its open door led into a cool, mercifully quiet darkness.

“Yes?” a voice called from the shadows. As Alek’s eyes adjusted, he saw a man staring up at them from a workbench cluttered with gears and springs. Larger mechaniks lined the walls—axles, pistons, one entire engine hulking in the gloom.

“Need a few parts, is all,” Klopp said.

The man looked them up and down, taking in the clothes they’d stolen from a farmer’s washing line a few days ago. All three of them were still coated with yesterday’s dirt and shredded rye.

The shopkeeper’s eyes dropped back to his work. “Not much in the way of farm mechaniks here. Try your luck at Kluge’s.”

“Here’s good enough,” Klopp said. He stepped forward and dropped a money purse onto the workbench. It struck the wood with a muffled chunk, its sides bulging with coins.

The man raised an eyebrow, then nodded.

Klopp began to list gears and glow plugs and electrikals, the parts of the Stormwalker that had begun to wear after a fortnight of travel. The shopkeeper interrupted with questions now and then, but never took his eyes from the money purse.

As he listened, Alek noticed that Master Klopp’s accent had changed. Normally, he spoke in a slow, clear cadence, but now his words blurred and trilled with a common drawl. For a moment Alek thought Klopp was pretending. But then he wondered if this was the man’s normal way of speaking. Maybe he put on an accent in front of nobles.

It was strange to think that in three years of training Alek had never heard his tutor’s true accent.

When the list was done, the shopkeeper nodded slowly. Then his eyes flicked to Alek. “And perhaps something for the boy?”

He pulled a toy from the clutter. It was a six-legged walker, a model of an eight-hundred-ton land frigate, Mephisto class. After winding its spring, the shopkeeper pulled the key from its back. The toy began to walk, jerkily pushing its way through the gears and screws.

The man glanced up, one eyebrow raised.

Two weeks ago Alek would have found the contraption fascinating, but now the jittering toy seemed childish. And it was insufferable that this commoner was calling him a boy.

He snorted at the tiny walker. “The pilothouse is all wrong. If that’s meant to be a Mephisto, it’s too far astern.”

The shopkeeper nodded slowly, leaning back with a smile. “Oh, you’re quite the young master, aren’t you? You’ll school me in mechaniks next, I suppose.”

Alek’s hand went instinctively to his side, where his sword would normally have hung. The man’s eyes tracked the gesture.

The room was dead silent for a moment.

Then Volger stepped forward and swept up the money purse. He pulled a gold coin out and slapped it down onto the workbench.

“You didn’t see us,” he said, his voice edged with steel.

The shopkeeper didn’t react, just stared at Alek, as if memorizing his face. Alek stared back at him, hand still on his imaginary sword, ready to issue a challenge. But suddenly Klopp was pulling him toward the door and back out onto the street.

As the dust and sunlight stung his eyes, Alek realized what he’d done. His accent, his bearing … The man had seen who he was.

“Perhaps our lesson in humility yesterday was insufficient,” Volger hissed as they pushed through the crowds, heading toward the stream that would lead back to the hidden walker.

“This is my fault, young master,” Klopp said. “I should have warned you not to speak.”

“He knew from the first word out of my mouth, didn’t he?” Alek said. “I’m a fool.”

“We’re all three fools.” Volger threw a silver coin at a butcher and snatched up two strings of sausages without stopping. “Of course they’ve warned the Guild of Mechaniks to look out for us!” He swore. “And we brought you straight into the first shop we found, thinking a bit of dirt would hide you.”

Alek bit his lip. Father had never allowed him to be photographed or even sketched, and now Alek knew why—in case he would ever need to hide. And yet he’d still given himself away. He’d heard the difference in Klopp’s speech. Why couldn’t he have kept his own mouth shut?

As they reached the edge of the market, Klopp pulled them to a halt, his nose in the air. “I smell kerosene. We need at least that, and motor oil, or we won’t get another kilometer.”

“Let’s be quick about it, then,” Volger said. “My bribe was probably worse than useless.” He shoved a coin into Alek’s hand and pointed. “See if you can buy a newspaper without starting a duel, Your Highness. We need to know if they’ve chosen a new heir yet, and how close Europe is to war.”

“But stay in sight, young master,” Klopp added.

The two men headed toward a stack of fuel cans, leaving Alek alone in the market’s crush. He pushed his way through the crowd, gritting his teeth against the jostling.

The newspapers were arrayed on a long bench, their pages weighted down with stones, corners fluttering in the breeze. He looked from one to the next, wondering which to choose. His father had always said that newspapers without pictures were the only ones worth reading.

His eyes fell on a headline: EUROPE’S SOLIDARITY AGAINST SERBIAN PROPAGANDA.

All the papers were like that, confident that the whole world supported Austria-Hungary after what had happened in Sarajevo. But Alek wondered if that were true. Even the people in this small Austrian town didn’t seem to care much about his parents’ murder.

“What’ll you have?” a voice demanded from the other side of the bench.

Alek looked at the coin in his hand. He’d never held money before, except for the Roman silver pieces in his father’s collection. This coin was gold, bearing the Hapsburg crest on one side and a portrait of Alek’s granduncle on the other—Emperor Franz Joseph. The man who had decreed that Alek would never take the throne.

“How many will this buy?” he asked, trying to sound common.

The newspaper man took the coin and eyed it closely. Then he slipped it into his pocket and smiled as though speaking to an idiot. “Many as you like.”

Alek started to demand a proper answer, but the words died on his tongue. Better to act like a fool than sound like a nobleman.

He swallowed his anger and filled his arms with one copy of every paper, even those plastered with photographs of racing horses and ladies’ salons. Perhaps Hoffman and Bauer would enjoy them.

As Alek glared at the newspaper man one last time, an unsettling realization overtook him. He spoke French, English, and Hungarian fluently, and always impressed his tutors in Latin and Greek. But Prince Aleksandar of Hohenberg could barely manage the daily language of his own people well enough to buy a newspaper.