The Havoc Machine

Chapter Four

Thad landed on the foot of the operating table intending to deliver a solid kick to Havoc’s face. Unfortunately, he lost his balance. Fortunately, he fell straight into Mr. Havoc. The two of them went down in a struggling bundle of arms and legs, brass and iron. Too late, Thad remembered the pistols under his coat. His anger had gotten the better of him.

Havoc’s thick metal arm shoved hard, and Thad skidded halfway across the floor on his back. The clockworker sat up. Dante peered down at him from the operating table with his one good eye.

“Who the hell are you?” Havoc boomed in Lithuanian. It would have been more impressive if he hadn’t been sitting on the ground with his legs open. “Have you come to steal my work?”

In answer, Thad pulled the pistols from beneath his jacket and took aim. “Olga,” he said.

Havoc blinked at him. “What?”

“Olga. She was one of the women you took from the village.”

“Oh. I take a lot of women. Sometimes dogs, too. Dogs are nice. I don’t remember a woman named Olga but I do remember a dog named Sunis, but a dog wouldn’t steal my work like you are trying to do.”

Thad fired. Havoc’s metal arm moved so fast, it blurred, and the bullet ricocheted away. “It seems stupid to name a dog dog, but he wasn’t mine and he didn’t live very long. It looks like you’re trying to kill me, so it would be prudent to kill you straightaway, though I would like to know why you didn’t fall into my pit so I can fix the problem, and it would have been interesting to save your brain for my work, the work you want to steal, and I do not take kindly to thieves.”

With a series of clicks and whirrs, an enormous pistol emerged from Havoc’s forearm. Thad scrambled to his feet and dove behind the worktable with the ten-legged spider on it just as Havoc fired. A spray of bullets chittered across the floor right behind Thad and pinged off the equipment piled on and around the table. Thad glanced up. The ten-legged spider sat on its pyramid of junk, just another piece of paraphernalia. Thad could almost touch it. Glass shattered as bullets zipped around for several seconds like deadly hummingbirds. Then they stopped. Thad risked a peek around the table. The fluid jars near him had been shattered, the gory contents pulped. Thad smelled sharp formaldehyde. Havoc, still sitting on the ground, was feeding bullet cartridges into his arm. Thad whipped his pistol around, then realized that from this angle, the boy on the table was partly in line of fire.

“Damn it,” he muttered.

“I hate it when people make a mess in my laboratory,” Havoc said, the words rippling endlessly from his mouth. “Especially thieves like you. It will take hours to clean this up, though I can use automatons to help me, but lately some haven’t been so cooperative, which is why I had to put some of my work aside, though this new breakthrough is very promising and I don’t appreciate that you have interrupted me, little thief.”

He fired again, and Thad ducked back behind the table. Bullets pocked and pinged all around him. A red-hot line scored his forearm and he snatched himself farther back. Blood trickled down the inside of his sleeve.

“I hit you, little thief. I can smell the blood. It’s funny how these days I can sense so much more than I could before I contracted this wonderful disease-”

“Dante!” Thad shouted. “Shut it!”

“Applesauce!” Dante’s interjection was followed by a scream from Havoc. Thad shoved himself away from the equipment pile and slid sideways on the floor. Dante was at Havoc’s shoulder, his sharp beak piercing Havoc’s ear as his needle claws dug into Havoc’s neck. Blood flew in all directions. Havoc’s metal arm fired wildly into the ceiling. The boy huddled on the operating table, but Thad’s slide across the floor had changed the trajectory so that the child wasn’t in the line of fire. The pistol barked three times in Thad’s hand. All three shots went straight into Havoc’s upper body. His arm gun went silent, and the clockworker toppled backward with a burbling gasp. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air.

“Olga!” Thad shouted at him.

“Bless my soul,” Dante said, hopping free of Havoc. His claws were red. “Doom!”

Thad glanced over at the ten-legged spider crouched atop the pile of equipment across the room. What about that thing was worth so much? In any case, it would keep for now. He ran to the table. The boy lay huddled on his side, shivering in his rags. For a terrible moment Thad was back in Poland looking down at David. But this wasn’t Poland, and this boy wasn’t David. There was no sheet, no blood, and Thad had arrived in time.

“It’s all right,” Thad told him, then cursed himself for speaking English. He switched to his heavy Lithuanian. “I’ll get you out of here. The bad man is dead. He can’t hurt you.”

The boy didn’t respond. Dante hopped up to Thad’s shoulder, blood still staining his beak and claws. Thad touched the boy’s shoulder. It was warm. “My name is Mr. Sharpe,” he said. “I’ve come to take you home. Can you sit up?”

A soft sound from the rags, like the sound of someone trying not to cry. Thad’s heart half broke.

“I’m going to pick you up,” Thad said. “I won’t hurt you.”

“But I…will…little thief.”

Thad spun in time to see Havoc slap a button on the back of his mechanical hand. It pulsed red, and a high-pitched sound squealed through the room. Havoc was gasping, and blood gushed from his chest wounds.

“You will not…steal…my work,” he panted. “No one…will steal…work.”

Before Thad could react, rats poured into the room. Tens and dozens and hundreds of them. They poured in from the door Havoc had used. They swarmed down from the balcony. They scampered down the spiral stairs. Thad had seen them before, but hadn’t noticed that they were partly animal and partly mechanical. Metal claws scratched and sparked against the stones and their eyes pulsed a scarlet that matched the button on the back of Havoc’s heavy hand. The high-pitched squeal grew louder.

“When enough arrive,” Havoc said, “rats reach…critical mass. Boom. You will die with my work…little thief.”

Havoc slumped back and went still, but the button on his hand continued its red pulse. The half-mechanical rats flooding the room ignored Thad and Dante and the boy to swarm over Havoc’s body in a metal cairn, their scarlet eyes beating a dreadful rhythm that grew louder and pounded against Thad’s bones. A palpable heat suffused the very air and the pulse sped up.

Thad shot a glance at the ten-legged spider on its junk pile all the way across the laboratory, then down at the boy on the table near him. The boy’s weight would slow Thad down and eat time. So would dashing across the room to grab the spider. Could he do both? Probably not. The pulse was blending now into a near-continuous sound of its own. He had to make a choice.

Thad shook his head. There was no choice. Besides, he knew damned well he hadn’t really intended to save the invention anyway. Thad swept the ragged boy into his arms and sprinted for the doorway Havoc had used. A steady stream of rats rushed past him in the opposite direction, and his boots crunched some of them. They twitched, still trying to crawl toward Havoc’s laboratory. Thad ran up a ramp and found himself at door. Once again he was in Poland, but this time David was still alive. He smashed into the door with his shoulder, but it wasn’t locked, or even latched. It burst open and he stumbled into the chilly air of the courtyard, the boy still in his arms.

“Sharpe is sharp,” Dante said. He had prudently moved to the back of Thad’s neck.

The pulse had become a shriek. Thad ran. This time he would win. This time the boy would live. His arms ached and his lungs burned, but he ran. He vaulted over the pit and plunged through the curtain of vines. The boy huddled in his arms didn’t make a sound the entire time. Outside, the hill’s downward slope made it easier, though his legs were getting heavy and stitch cramped his side.

The explosion shoved him forward with a rude hand. Heat washed over him and singed the hair from his neck. Thad curled around the boy and took the rolling bumps and bruises as his due penance. When they stopped rolling, Thad cautiously pulled himself away from the boy. His body ached in a way that told him his muscles would scream at him in the morning, but he didn’t seem to have any broken bones.

“Bless my soul!” Dante squawked from the ground several paces away.

“Are you all right?” Thad asked the boy in Lithuanian. “Can you walk?”

The boy, still wrapped in his rags and scarf, nodded and got to his feet even as Thad, groaning, did the same. The castle, a ruin before, was now a total wreck. Multicolored flames danced against the night sky. So much for Havoc’s invention. Thad wondered if the villagers would come to investigate or if they’d stay huddled in their homes.

“Let me see if you are injured.” Thad tried to pull the boy’s scarf away, but the boy yelped and snatched himself back.

“Na, na,” he said. No.

Thad put up his hands. What dreadful things had Havoc done that made the boy fear being touched? “All right. I’ll take your word. We should leave now.”

At that moment, Sofiya came galloping up on her clockwork horse with Blackie on a lead rein behind her. “What happened?” she demanded in English. “Did you get the invention? Where is it?”

“Havoc set off a doomsday device to destroy the castle,” Thad said shortly. He set Dante back on his shoulder. “I had time to save the device or the boy. Not both.”

Sofiya went pale. “Our employer will be…upset.”

“That I saved a human being instead of a machine?” Thad snarled. “Your employer can have the damn money back.”

She looked away and her voice dropped. “You do not understand how important this was to him.”

“He’ll have to do without.” Thad jerked a thumb at the burning castle. “It seems safe to say Havoc’s machine is gone.”

“Hm.” Sofiya stared at the leaping flames, her mouth a hard, white line. The horse stamped a foot and snorted. “There will be trouble, Mr. Sharpe. A great deal of trouble.”

“Applesauce,” said Dante.

“Thank you,” the boy said in a clear, piping voice.

Thad turned to him in surprise. “You speak English?”

“Thank you,” the boy repeated softly. “For taking me out of there.”

It was like hearing David again. Thad’s throat thickened, and he coughed. “It’s all…I mean, I’m glad to do it, son.”

Son. He should have chosen a different word. Well, the boy wouldn’t know. He knelt in front of the boy while Sofiya shifted impatiently atop her brass horse.

“What’s your name?” Thad asked.

The boy shrugged.

“You don’t know?” Thad said, puzzled. “Or you don’t remember?”

“I don’t have one,” the boy said. “Mr. Havoc called me boy.”

“What about before that?” Thad said. “What did your parents call you?”

“I don’t know.”

Thad thought of the brains in Havoc’s laboratory and outrage bloomed like red fireworks. “He took your memories?”

“I don’t know,” the boy repeated. His voice was sad. “I’m frightened.”

Incensed and angry and horrified all at once, Thad barely restrained himself from scooping the boy up and embracing him to give him comfort.

This is not David, he told himself firmly. This is not your son.

Carefully, ready to pull back if the boy flinched, Thad put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. It was hard and bony. “Don’t worry. We’ll help you. We’ll find your parents and see what we can do to bring back your memory.”

“We?” Sofiya said.

Thad rose and looked at her. “Was I being presumptuous, Miss Ekk?”

“I suppose not,” she sighed. “Come along, then. We should probably check in the village first. Before we face our employer.”

“Good idea. We can start with any families that speak English.”

“In this place?” Sofiya scoffed. “Quite unlikely. But as you say, we must start somewhere. And I suppose we should tell the nice lady that her sister has been avenged.”

Thad mounted Blackie and pulled the boy up behind him. The boy clung to Thad’s waist with fearful strength, and Thad wanted nothing more than to continue protecting this child. He hoped to find the parents soon-and that they were nice people.

The ride to the village was quick and quiet. The sun was rising, putting hesitant fingers of light into an azure sky and setting Sofiya’s clockwork horse ablaze. She looked magnificent, Thad had to admit, in her scarlet cloak and waterfall of golden hair, though she was nothing like his Ekaterina. The wealth represented by her horse and her clothing stood in stark contrast to the rough houses and loose homespun of the peasants in the village. As Thad and Sofiya rode into town, the people crept out of their houses, and Thad caught metallic flashes-knives and pitchforks and other farming implements. A tension rode the air, like lightning ready to strike. He glanced at Sofiya, who also looked uncertain. What was going on?

Thad pulled Blackie up. “The demon,” he announced in Lithuanian, “is dead!”

The people burst into cheers. The tension evaporated, and Vilma, the woman who had given Thad the vodka, ran forward, reaching up to press her face into his hand, wetting it with her tears. Thad shrank into his coat. Usually after a kill, he left without looking back. To deflect the awkwardness, he asked if anyone was missing a child. But no one was.

Vilma stepped forward again. “The demon, he only took adults. Or dogs. Sometimes young people who were sixteen or seventeen, but never children.”

“What about anyone from a nearby village? Is anyone else missing a child?”

More murmuring. “No, my lord,” said Vilma.

“Then we should go look for his parents,” Thad declared. “Ada. Farewell!”

And, ignoring their pleas to stay, he spurred Blackie ahead. Sofiya was left with no choice but to follow.

“I wonder how long it will take for this to evolve into a fairy tale,” Sofiya mused once they had cleared the village. “A variation of Hansel and Gretel, perhaps.”

“Or the Pied Piper,” Thad said.

“What?”

But Thad didn’t answer. Sofiya rode beside him, Dante gripped his shoulder, and the boy clung to his waist behind him. It felt strange to be surrounded by so many people after spending so many years alone. Even in the circus he held himself apart from the other performers. The sun had fully risen now, and he caught a hint of salt on the crisp air, though the Baltic Sea was many miles to the northwest. Now that he wasn’t actually in danger, the long night and his aches were catching up with him, and he fervently wished there were some way around the long ride back to Vilnius.

“Your horse is amazing, lady,” said the boy after a while. “He’s very pretty and I like the way his mane stands up. Like a warrior. What is his name?”

“It has none,” Sofiya said. “It is a machine.”

“Everyone has to have a name,” the boy said. He sounded upset. “Even a machine.”

“Perhaps you could give him a name.”

“Kalvis.”

“The blacksmith god of the Lithuanians,” Sofiya said. “Fitting.”

“Because he was made by a blacksmith,” the boy finished. “What’s your horse’s name, sir?”

“Uh…Blackie.”

“That’s dumb.”

“Now look-” Thad began.

“I’m hungry,” said the boy.

Feeling guilty, Thad pulled the loaf of rye bread from his coat. He should have realized. “Here.”

But the boy pushed it away. “Na, na. I can’t eat that. You have to give me something else.”

“There isn’t anything else,” Thad said, annoyed again. He pulled the vodka jug from his pocket. It sloshed. “Except this. But you’re bit young for-”

The boy snatched the jug from Thad’s startled hand, raised it to his mouth, and pulled his scarf down. Over his shoulder, Thad caught a glimpse of metal as the boy drank. Thad was off the horse so fast, Dante nearly lost his balance.

“Applesauce,” he squawked with indignation.

“What the hell?” Thad demanded.

The boy clutched the empty jug to his chest. The scarf that covered his face and hair slipped, revealing brass. Thad reached up and yanked the cloth away.

The boy was an automaton. The lower part of his face was metallic, with a square jaw that fitted neatly against a brass upper lip. A brass hinge was fitted neatly under a rubbery ear. The boy’s nose was a smooth bump complete with nostrils, though it was made of copper and didn’t match the rest of him. The upper half of his face was made of some flexible material. Rubber, perhaps. Eyelids blinked with quiet clicking sounds, and they even had tiny eyelashes. His eyes were wide and brown, but not glassy. Were they rubber as well? The boy’s forehead and the area around his eyes moved with easy fluidity and realism. In fact, the boy’s entire body moved with none of the stiffness Thad associated with other automatons, and his voice sounded pure and human, without the usual mechanical monotony or odd echo. His short brown hair even had a silky sheen. It probably was silk. Thad stared in shock.

“Dear God,” he said.

“Bless my-” Dante’s words were cut off when Thad grabbed his beak.

“This explains much,” Sofiya said. “The boy remembers nothing because he no memories. He uses alcohol as fuel. Havoc experimented on living adults but this was his first-”

“Shut it,” Thad snapped. “Just shut it!”

“Why?” Sofiya’s voice was deceptively mild. “Did someone give you the right to hand me orders? Are you my good Polish husband now?”

Thad wanted to round on her, snarl at her, but kept himself under control. Sofiya was a woman, and telling her to shut up was already a serious breach of etiquette, something his father would have bent him over one knee for when he was a child. And why was he worried about that now? He didn’t care what Sofiya thought. He made himself look up at Blackie and the thing in the saddle.

A child. This automaton had fooled Thad into thinking it was a real child. He felt like he’d been kicked in the head and his stomach oozed nausea. His skin crawled. The boy was the product of a clockworker, and who knew what it might do? It had been riding behind him for miles now.

“Thank you for taking me out of there.”

But he was just a little boy. And he sounded like-

“No,” Thad whispered.

“This boy is a masterpiece,” Sofiya went on. “So lifelike. I am impressed. Havoc was much better than I imagined.”

“Get off my horse,” Thad said to the boy. “Now.”

The boy shrank down inside the rags. “Are you going to hurt me?” he-it-asked in a tiny voice.

Thad was shaking. This…thing was the product of a murderous lunatic, the same sort of lunatic who had tortured his son to death. Thad didn’t rescue such monstrosities; he destroyed them. This abomination should be melted down.

But when he looked at those eyes and at the way he-it, Thad reminded himself fiercely-the way it huddled on the horse, frightened and alone…

It’s not frightened, Thad snarled inwardly. It’s only mimicking fright because its memory wheels are pulling wires and pushing pistons.

A sword threatened to divide Thad down the middle and he didn’t dare move in case it cut him.

I love you, Daddy.

“What are you going to do?” Sofiya asked. “Are you going to hurt him?”

Hurt him.

The sword shifted imperceptibly, changing his balance like the weight of the vodka bottle pulling him back from the pit.

“I’ll have to decide later,” Thad said in a stony voice. “Get off my horse. You can ride with Miss Ekk back to Vilnius.”

“Ha!” said Sofiya with a snort. “You rescued him. He rides with you.” And she turned her brass horse toward the road to make it clear there was no arguing.

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.

“Stop it,” Thad said. “You’re frightening-”

“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.

“I am a peasant, Mr. Sharpe,” she replied. “Does that shock you?”

“You don’t act like a peasant.”

“And you don’t act like a human being. The world is an incredible place.”

“Now, look-”

“At any rate,” Mr. Griffin interrupted through his speaker, “peasant resentment to this treatment is increasing. In addition, the Ukrainian Empire has fallen apart, and that has emboldened the peasants elsewhere. Vilnius is quiet, but farther out, feelings have become, to use your word, tense. No one has actually attacked a landowner’s stronghold yet, but the peasantry has begun to express its displeasure in other ways. Telegraph lines are cut. Herds owned by the landowner are raided by ‘wolves.’ Coaches are robbed. And the state-owned trains, ones that transport passengers and conscripted troops, are sabotaged. All of this, you see, is a roundabout way of saying that coach and train travel between here and Saint Petersburg has become dreadfully unreliable, and I’m afraid I cannot stomach the unreliable.” Mr. Griffin gave a chocolatey chuckle, as if he had made a private joke.

Thad put his hands on his knees. “So you want me to find a reliable way.”

“No. I’ve already found one. I need you to finish it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t. I haven’t explained it yet,” Mr. Griffin snapped. “As you can see, Mr. Sharpe, I travel with a great deal of luggage, enough to take up two train cars. You are going to get those train cars to Saint Petersburg by the end of the week.”

“By hauling them myself?”

“I selected you as an employee for two reasons, Mr. Sharpe. The first was that you were the best candidate to get Havoc’s invention. You failed. The second reason is that you are attached to a circus train.”

A dreadful light dawned. Thad’s mouth went dry. Now more people were getting involved. He had to talk fast. “Look, the Kalakos Circus isn’t a passenger train. You can’t ask Ringmaster Dodd to take on-”

The spiders clacked their claws in unison again, cutting Thad off. The memory of Blackie’s last scream echoed in his head.

“You will persuade the ringmaster,” Mr. Griffin’s smooth voice said. “You will use my money and your words and whatever actions you feel will accomplish this task. You will keep any particulars you have deduced about me to yourself. You will definitely not tell the circus anything about my nature or about the circumstances of our dealings. You will remember that my spiders are watching. They are watching that parrot you’re so fond of. They are watching Ringmaster Dodd and his circus. They are watching the boy. And they are watching you.”

Thad got to his feet, pale as Sofiya. “You’ll get your damned train.”

“So glad to hear it,” Mr. Griffin said.

“And once you arrive in Russia,” Thad added, “we’re finished. You go your way, and I go mine.”

Mr. Griffin said, “Just tell your ringmaster that the tsar loves a circus.”

* * *

The signal touched the machine with a soft finger. It awoke, moved all ten legs, and felt its way through darkness. There were obstacles in its way, some hard, some soft, some sticky. The machine pushed them aside or found a way round them. Once it had to pull its legs in tight and scoot on its belly. Through it all, the signal’s haunting melody pulled it forward.

The obstacles ended. The machine spiraled down a long staircase, skittered down a stone passageway, and found itself in a deep pit. Without pausing, it climbed the walls and pushed aside the long, thin objects dangling near at top. It sensed a vague warmth overhead and saw shapes of other objects around it. The machine didn’t pause to make sense of anything-the signal continued its pull.

Freed of constraint now, the machine ran. Some of the objects it encountered jumped back and made sounds, but the machine kept running. Eventually it came to a long line of boxy objects sitting on metal wheels. The signal beckoned. Other objects moved about the machine in a rushed cacophony of sound and light and heat. If these objects noticed the machine, they didn’t react to it. The machine dashed up to the boxlike object that was emitting the sweet signal, crawled underneath to the metal undercarriage, and clamped all ten legs to a metal bar.

It waited.