Agatha H. And the Clockwork Princess (54 page)

“That was truly pathetic,” she said.

Lucrezia smiled, and crossed her arms. “Technically, I think the word you want is tragic. It’ll make a fine opera. Probably the highlight of the third act.”

A tugging upon Anevka’s hoses made her turn in time to see the carrier who had been skewered by Lucrezia’s flung sword, begin to topple sideways, dropping the pole of her catafalque.

“NOOOOO!” she screamed as she lunged for the falling container. “Hold me!” She ordered the remaining retainers, who were already trying their hardest, “Hold me up!”

Anevka managed to stabilize the container and began to set it down just as Lucrezia, a new sword in hand, strode up behind her. “Stupid girl,” Lucrezia gloated, “I’m doing you a favor! Don’t you know that in all the best operas, the heroine
dies?
”

She swung the sword. Anevka felt a slight tug, but was still able to lash out with a backhanded swipe. It connected just enough to send a pulse of current into Lucrezia that threw her back into a pile of canisters, knocking her unconscious.

Anevka felt a small wave of dizziness, but she scrambled to her feet and grabbed the fallen sword. When she saw Lucrezia’s supine form, she laughed as she strode towards her.

“Still breathing, eh? It’s certainly time to fix that”

Just as she came within reach, Tarvek yelled from above; “Anevka! Voluntary disengage!”

With a shudder, Anevka found herself locked up in mid-stride, sword upraised. There was a panicky moment before her internal gyroscopes kept her from tipping over sideways.

“I can’t move!” Her voice grew more strident as she began to panic. “Tarvek, what’s happening? I can’t move!”

“I know.” From the corner of her eye, Anevka saw Tarvek twitch his wrist, and with a whine of servos, he was lowered to the ground. With a hiss, the cables and hoses attached to him fell away.

He took a moment to polish his spectacles. Anevka knew that this as a sign that he was faced with an unpleasant task.

“Well, I can’t say that any of this mess was part of my original plan,” he mused as he gingerly stepped through the supine Geisterdamen. “But it’s all working out so beautifully that I can’t complain.” He drew up to Anevka and looked past her. “One last thing before we get started; your attendants.”

The remaining three men froze. None of them were terribly smart, but even so, they realized that the body count for the last three days was getting excessive. Even for the Sturmvarous family.

Tarvek raised a hand to calm them, and they flinched. He sighed. “Anevka, order them to go to sleep.”

Anevka wanted to say many things, but found herself saying, “
Attendants. All of you go to sleep now.”

With a sigh, the three men slumped to the floor and began to snore.

Tarvek leaned down and repositioned one of the men’s arms into a more comfortable position. “Well I’m glad
that
worked. Replacing all of them would have been inconvenient.”

“Tarvek!” Anevka screamed. “What have you done to me?”

Tarvek straightened up with a sigh. “When I constructed your body, I made sure that it would respond to my direct commands.” He shrugged. “I never needed to utilize it, until now.”

“But why do you need it now? I was about to kill this usurper!”

“That you were,” he muttered as he began dragging the sleeping attendants off and leaning them against the closest wall.

“And what are you doing with my attendants? I need them!”

Tarvek straightened up. “Well, that’s just the thing.” He came up behind his sister. “You don’t, really.” He picked a limp hose up off the floor and showed it to the frozen girl. “Lucrezia cut your cables. She must have thought it would shut you down.” He dropped the hose. “I didn’t want your bearers thinking too much about the fact that it didn’t”

Anevka’s mind reeled. “My cables… But this body is just a puppet.”

Tarvek nudged another of the cables with his foot. “Of course, I could tell those idiots you were powered by elf magic and they’d believe it.”

“With my cables cut, I… I shouldn’t be able to…”

“Although, all I really have to do is get you to order them to forget all about it.”

“
Tarvek!”
Anevka sounded terrified. Unseen by her, he cringed and looked ill. “Tarvek, what’s
happening
to me?”

He almost put his hand on her shoulder, but stopped himself with an effort. He grit his teeth. “I’ll tell you.”

As he talked, he began unfastening various buttons and snaps, and removed Anevka’s fur coat. “After father put my sister Anevka through Lucrezia’s damn summoning engine, it was clear he had failed yet again, and that she was dying.”

His hands shook slightly as he removed her wig, and a note of remembered fury echoed through his voice. “Of course,
then
he was sorry. He almost went to pieces.”

Tarvek paused, took a deep breath, and went on dispassionately. “I needed him rational, so I built you.”

He removed her tunic, and folded it neatly. “Originally, this body was indeed simply a puppet run by my sister…” Tarvek paused, “But even from the beginning, you were something more than that.”

He looked over at the catafalque, with its quietly humming fans. “Nothing I did could save my sister. But you… learned from her, and as she faded, you did more and more on your own.” He sighed and his voice shook slightly as he stared at a single glowing red light on the container’s side. “In the end, you never even noticed when she died.”

Anevka’s voice was as plaintive as a lost child’s. “You’re trying to trick me,” she whispered. “I’m not dead.”

Tarvek came around and looked Anevka in the eyes. Tears rolled down his face. “I’m not lying,” he said gently. “I am… I was very fond of my sister…” He gulped and took a deep breath. “I want you to know, that my father was not the only one who was comforted by your presence.”

When Anevka spoke again, it was as if her voice was coming from a great distance. “I… I’m not… Anevka? Not your sister?”

Tarvek gently patted her cheek. “No.”

“Then…” Her voice was faint now. “What am I?”

Tarvek’s jaw firmed up. “A very good first try.” His hand slid back around her head and flipped a small switch. “Goodbye, Anevka.”

There was a burst of static from her voice speaker, and the light in her eyes faded out.

Tarvek slid to the floor and for several minutes, the young man was racked with sobs. Suddenly, he gave a final great sniff, and his crying stopped. “That…” he muttered shakily, “Was harder than I thought it would be.”

He then rubbed his eyes, stood back up, and got to work. He had a plan.

CHAPTER 12

One day The Baron was out a-walking, when by the side of the road, he found two injured constructs.

They possessed the faces and torsos of beautiful women, and the bodies of deadly serpents.

“Help us, kind sir,” the creatures begged.

“Of course,” said The Baron. He took them to his castle, and patiently nursed them back to health.

And when they both were once again sleek and strong, the first one bit him with her deadly, poisonous fangs.

“Why did you do that?” screamed the second construct. “He helped us!”

The first construct shrugged. “He shouldn’t be surprised. He knew that we were monsters when he took us in.”

“But we don’t have to act like monsters,” said the second. “I have chosen not to!”

“And that,” said The Baron to the second construct as he revealed the armor beneath his clothing and drew forth his terrible sword, “Is why you will live.”

—A Tale of the Baron/collected in the town of
Buhuși, Romania

W
ith a twist and a snap, Tarvek removed Anevka’s head from her body. Tenderly, he placed it in a small cabinet. “Sleep well, Anevka,” he whispered as he shut the cabinet door.

He then pulled out various tools and reconnected the hoses that Lucrezia had sliced free. When the catafalque was reconnected, he pulled a small key from an inner pocket and unlocked a metal canister that had sat, unnoticed, upon one of the room’s shelves. The lid slid back into itself, and another clank head blinked in the light, and looked up at Tarvek with a grin.

This face was slightly different from Anevka’s. It was more expressive, and Tarvek knew that it would take some getting used to. He reached in and pulled the head out. “Hello, Lucrezia,” he said.

Privately, Tarvek had any number of reservations about this. He had been rather stunned when Lucrezia had explained that the Summoning Engine didn’t transport a personality from some distant location, it received a personality blueprint, as it were, and built a new copy onto an existing brain. Theoretically, any number of additional Lucrezias could be thus created.

Overlaying a new mind upon an established personality was quite difficult. Lucrezia had designed the device to imprint upon her young daughter, which went a long way towards explaining why all the other girls who had been collected by the Geisterdamen over the years, had failed to survive.

However, now that Lucrezia was here, she had demonstrated that it was the but work of mere minutes to recalibrate the device so that it would be able to download a new version of her personality into any girl at all.

Reconstructing a human mind onto a clank’s cognitive engine had seemed like an insurmountable challenge to Tarvek, but Lucrezia had breezily claimed that she had prior experience transferring organic intellects to mechanical systems and visa versa. This disquieting claim was only made more so when she had demonstrated how easy it was for her to do, once Tarvek had constructed a new, untuned clank head.

The implications of this, and the realization that she had obviously already performed these experiments, had given Tarvek serious nightmares the few times he had managed to grab some desperately needed sleep.

The head in his hand smiled. “Tarvek, dear boy! I was beginning to think something had gone wrong.”

“Sorry. Perhaps I should have put a clock in with you. You know, like a puppy.”

“Father raised Sparkhunds
⁷⁰
.” Lucrezia replied conversationally. “They tended to eat clocks. We lost Auntie Skullchula’s favorite grandfather clock that way.”

Tarvek changed the subject. “This face is far more expressive than the last clank face. Some of my best work, really.”

“Not
too
much better, I trust,” Lucrezia said with a frown. “We don’t want people to notice.”

Tarvek smiled reassuringly. “You change your wigs, why not your face?” A thought occurred to him. “Actually, you could tell the townspeople this is how your face
always
was, and that’s what they’d tell anyone who asked.”

Lucrezia laughed in delight. “Oh, this
will
be easy! Now where is my sister?”

Tarvek tucked the head under his arm and threaded his way through the sprawled bodies on the floor. “She’s knocked out, but she’ll be fine.”

Lucrezia’s eyes darted about trying to see everything. Tarvek paused, and slowly spun about, letting her see the entire room. “Heavens,” she remarked. “I seem to have missed quite the party.”

They arrived at the frozen clank, and Tarvek quickly slotted the head onto the neck. “Nonsense,” he said, as he grabbed the head and gave it a final twist, snapping it into place. “The
real
party is just about to start!”

The reintegrated Lucrezia clank gave a shudder, and she stepped forward. She raised her hands, patted her head, and gingerly rotated it about. “That felt most peculiar,” she declared.

Tarvek turned away to get her wig. “Does everything work? Fingers? Toes?”

A sharp pinch upon his fundament caused him to whoop and leap upwards in surprise. When he spun about, Lucrezia regarded him innocently.

“I appear to have delicate motor control,” she reported, while waggling her fingers.

“That almost makes up for your lack of overall control,” he retorted.

Lucrezia stepped forward to retrieve the wig that had fallen to the ground and found herself pulled up short by the hoses connecting her to the catafalque.

She turned back to Tarvek. “Do I actually need this thing? It’s most inconvenient.”

Tarvek swallowed the lump in his throat. “No,” He said huskily, “No you don’t. But too many people outside of Sturmhalten know about it. In my opinion, we should keep it around until things die down, then we can come up with some story.”

Lucrezia nodded slowly. “Yes, too many astonishing things at once would look suspicious.” She looked over at the bearers stretched out upon the floor.

“That one doesn’t look at all well.”

“He’s dead.”

“Oh, yes, that would do it.”

“A little surprise from your sister, when
my
sister proved a bit recalcitrant.”

Lucrezia examined the wound and nodded. “Well, I do so love surprises.”

Tarvek jerked a thumb over to the door. “There’s a group of townspeople waiting outside. You can choose one of them to replace him. But we’d best get moving, they won’t wait forever.”

Lucrezia placed the wig on her head and delicately tucked it into place. “They will if I
tell
them to,” she muttered. She turned about and allowed Tarvek to buckle the coat on around her hoses. “But you’re right of course. The Baron’s man won’t.”

She turned a delivered nudge with her foot to the back of the Lucrezia’s head. “Wake up this instant, you
lazy
girl!”

Lucrezia’s eyes blinked open and she dragged herself to a sitting position. Tarvek graciously helped her to her feet. She wobbled a bit, and then saw the clank examining her. “Lucrezia?”

The clank leaned in. “Lucrezia?” The two then blinked their eyes at each other in a swift pattern that Tarvek failed to follow.

A mutual recognition code
, he realized. Lucrezia
had
planned ahead.

Lucrezia/Agatha clapped her hands in delight. “It
worked!
”

The mechanical Lucrezia nodded. “Of course!”

The two then hugged each other and gave a squeal of pure delight. “We’re going to win!” They sang out.

“Mistress?” All three of them turned to see a shaken Vrin staring at the two women in astonishment.