The Havoc Machine (15 page)

“Sorry,” he muttered, blotting ineffectively at the mess with the handkerchief. He was suddenly embarrassed at being in a sickbed in front of Sofiya, especially with her playing nurse. At least he was still wearing his clothes.

“It is understandable.” She produced a tea towel to help clean up. “It will take time for you to learn its use.”

“I can’t seem to—” He stiffened. “You. I didn’t understand before.
You
forged this hand. Not Griffin.”

“Yes.”

“You amputated my original hand and attached this one.”

“Yes.”

“You’re—”

“A clockworker. Yes.”

The signs rushed at Thad like boulders down a mountainside. The agility she had displayed on the train. Her remark about clockworkers not being evil. Her occasionally erratic behavior. Her affinity for Nikolai. The horse and the pistol. He had assumed Kalvis had come from Mr. Griffin, though she had never actually said so, and she had simply lied about buying the gun. His stomach roiled again and he swallowed hard to keep it under control.

“You’re fil—”

She held up a hand. “That will keep.”

“You’re as bad as Griffin.” He thrust out his own hand, the brass one. “You did this to me in order to—”

“I saved your life because you destroyed your hand for me. Is this something a lunatic would do?”

He closed his eyes. The world rocked around him,
pushing and pulling at him and trying to tip him over while he slid a sword into his throat. He felt for his blades, but they were gone. She had taken them.

“How is it possible?” he said. “You don’t present like a clockworker.”

“It is early for me still.” She rested in her chin in her hand. Her fleshy, human hand. “I know what you have been through, Thad. I understand it from the inside. But you cut the world in half with your swords and your knives, and you believe everything must fall on one side or the other.”

“Clockworkers are monsters.”

“A clockworker
saved
you,” she said. “An automaton
saved
you. What does it take for you to see us as something other than evil?”

Thad didn’t answer for a long moment. Then he said, “We haven’t heard the end of Griffin, have we?”

“I doubt it very much. He still needs us for something. Like he needed Havoc’s machine.” She wound a strand of golden hair around her finger. “I was the baby of the family, you know. I had four elder brothers and two elder sisters. My mother was a dairy worker outside of this very city. She knew to make cheese that melted in the mouth. My father, he was often away. There was no work in my village, so he often went to Saint Petersburg. Many men do this, and leave their families unprotected. And still there was little—my family were serfs and most of what we earned went to the landowner in taxes and fees. Ivan and Mikhail, two of my brothers, were conscripted into the army when they were thirteen and fourteen.” Her face grew sad. “I still have not heard what happened to them. They are probably dead, fighting Turks in a foreign
war, but no one thinks to write home about the death of a serf.”

Thad lay without moving. Each word was a tiny nail that pinned him to the bed.

“There was no money, ever. My mother, she later found work in the landowner’s kitchen as a cook, and then things became a little better. Cooks, of course, can sneak extra food away, and they also have a reputation for being willing to trade their bodies for little gifts from other men.”

Thad stared at her. “Your mother let men—”

“Yes, of course.” Sofiya straightened her cloak. “I know that farther west, people find this shocking, but in Russia, it is quite normal. The husbands of the women all know it happens but act as if they know nothing. It became better at home because Mama could sell the things men gave her. And we could eat twice a day.”

“It’s prostitution,” Thad said. He couldn’t help it.

“It is the world,” Sofiya said. “It moves the way it moves, not as you think it should. When a woman’s husband is away and she has a baby which cannot be his, she will take it to the forest or a lake and—”

“I don’t want to hear,” Thad interrupted. “No more.”

“The man who kills the victims of the clockwork plague balks at the death of a baby who would grow up as hated and unwanted as a clockworker,” she said. “How strange.”

“Clockworkers aren’t victims,” Thad said. “David was a victim.”

“Both cannot be victims?” Sofiya gestured at his hand. “You should exercise that. The more you use it, the easier it will become to control it.”

Thad thought of refusing, then set that aside as unrealistic and childish. He flexed the hand and tried working the fingers one by one. It still felt numb. A clockworker had forced him to shoot his own hand off. He felt violated and angry and sick, and he wanted to hit something or yell or scream. Instead he made himself wiggle fingers.

“My mother’s deed mattered little in the end,” Sofiya continued. “Papa came home last winter festival. He’d been gone for seven months, and I was so happy to see him. He was tall and strong and he had a big brown beard that made him very proud. He brought me chocolate drops from the city, and a little toy dog made of painted clay. Grigori and Nikolai, my other brothers, came from their homes to visit.”

“Nikolai?”

“I gave that name after my brother, yes,” Sofiya said. “We ate together and it was a fine night. But the next day Papa was coughing. When fever came, we knew what it was. By then it was too late.”

“I’m sorry,” Thad said automatically. The thumb was especially hard to use. He folded it in and out, in and out.

“Papa died first.” Sofiya’s voice was matter-of-fact now. “Then Mama and Nikolai. Grigori lost his mind and stumbled away. You call it a zombie. I call it my older brother, the one who used to climb trees to pick apples for me and who could whistle so like a bird, he could fool them into thinking he was one of them. I found out later someone shot him. My sister Olenka…” She trailed off.

The pain Thad had seen in her before was back, though Sofiya was working to cover it.

“Your sister what?” he asked.

“She became very ill,” Sofiya said quickly, “but she
recovered. I recovered from the illness, too, but I…I was different. I have seen things no one should have seen, and now I see things no one else can see.” She paused. “I went into a fugue and built a sledge that could drive itself across the snow. It took me to Saint Petersburg. But Russia is not kind to clockworkers, you know.”

“My mother was from Minsk.”

“She was?” Sofiya raised her eyebrows. “Then the way Russian serfs behave should not be a surprise to you.”

“My mother never talked about her life in Minsk,” Thad replied shortly. “Ever.”

“Perhaps this is why. Perhaps she joined the circus to get away from a landowner who—”

“We were talking about clockworkers,” Thad interjected. He ticked off points. “England fears clockworkers. China reveres them. And Russia? Russia loathes them.” He belatedly realized he was using his brass hand and stared at it for moment.

“True. But all three places use their—our—inventions quite happily. I knew in Saint Petersburg I would have to hide. It would not be safe if anyone knew what I had become. And then Mr. Griffin found me. I don’t know how. But he promised he could help my sister. And he has, after a fashion. Olenka has everything she needs now, and does not break her back in the field—or in a rich man’s bed.”

“But Griffin exacts a price.”

“Everything has a price.” She tapped his hand, and her fingernail clicked against the brass.

“You are early in the process,” Thad said. “You haven’t gone insane. That’s how you hid your…status
from me and why you can still work with other people without being cruel or wicked.”

“I imagine so.”

A little heat came to his voice. “Doesn’t it bother you to know that you’ll go mad and die in less than three years? Don’t you want to find a cure?”

“A cure?” Her laugh was like ice. “This is the most fun I have had in my entire life, Thaddeus Sharpe. Ideas slice through my mind like silver knives, and they carve secrets out of the darkness. I am very much looking forward to seeing what happens next. And then, when I finally go mad, I will forget everything—the plague, my family, and every scrap of pain. I can hardly wait.”

Thad swallowed. He had never thought that someone with the plague would want anything but a cure. A number of uncomfortable new truths were forcing themselves on him today. Thad flexed his new hand again and changed the subject. “You made this out of one of Griffin’s spiders, didn’t you?”

“I did. I am very proud.”

“Can he still…use it?”

“I very much doubt it.”

“He orders me to destroy your—my—hand over one of his blasted spiders, and then he just
gives
you a spider to replace it?”

“He didn’t give. I took.” Sofiya closed her eyes. “The destruction of your hand sent me into a fugue. Your hand became a…project, and only my death could have stopped me from taking one of Mr. Griffin’s spiders. Mr. Griffin knew that, so he allowed it. He doesn’t wish me to die, you see. Not yet. I also think the entire affair amuses him.”

“Amuses
him?”

“It put me further into his debt. And now a clockworker who uses spiders for hands has a man in his employ who has a spider for a hand. Mr. Griffin still has that spider as a hand, you see, even though you hate clockworkers. I think he couldn’t resist the irony.”

Jaw tight, Thad pushed aside the bedclothes and swung his legs around. The last of the opiate fog had faded from his system and he was feeling normal now. Except for the hand. He looked at Sofiya.

“You told me all that about yourself in order to change my mind about clockworkers,” he said. “So I would see a person, with history and life instead of a monster.”

“Of course. Was I successful?”

He exhaled slowly, as if sending clouds of thought to Mount Olympus. “I think,” he replied slowly, forming the words as the ideas came to him, “that I am willing to work with you as long as we have a common enemy in Mr. Griffin.”

“Good. And as someone who continues to work with you, I have one favor to ask.”

“And that would be?”

She towed him toward the door. “It will be easier to talk about it after the cannon goes off.”

*   *   *

The machine crouched in the darkness, listening to the signal, and learning. It learned words like
tunnel
and
darkness
and
metal
and
gears
and
memory
and
thought
and
knowledge
and
master.
The knowledge came slowly, over a period of
days,
another new word that was part of the word
time.
Other spiders, ones similar but inferior to
itself, brought the machine metals of many different kinds. The machine touched the metals, tasting them with its feet. It liked them, became excited by them for reasons it could not name.

It learned the world
build.

W
hen they got outside, Thad discovered that the circus was fully set up. The striped Tilt held court in the center with the smaller sideshow tents trying to get its attention. Waiting behind like servants were the wagons and tents where the performers lived, including Thad, and just beyond that, the row of train cars. A web of ropes and stakes wove itself over everything. Sawdust and straw crunched underfoot as a preemptive measure to keep down the mud, and Thad inhaled smells of animals and machine oil and frying food. Marcus was playing the calliope in the Tilt, and the strangely haunting and jaunty music wandered among the tents with the performers, some of whom wore bright costumes, some of whom wore ordinary street clothes. A bit of Thad’s fear and tension eased. It was the circus, and the circus was home.

He remembered running among ropes and canvas walls when he was small, playing jackstraws and deerstalker, listening to the rain fall on the roof on the wagon—the same wagon Thad lived in now—while his
mother sang in Russian and his father sharpened knives, watching the everyday sight of one of the horse girls in her tight sleeves and bodice and one day feeling newly strange about it, stealing a kiss from Gretchen Neuberg behind clown alley, learning to swallow swords and pick locks and throw knives, catching the eye of a beautiful, dark-haired woman in the grandstand during a performance in Warsaw, announcing to his parents that he was leaving the circus to marry his Ekaterina.

Leaving had been difficult, but good. He’d had his new life in Warsaw. But bit by bit that life had been whittled away. Ekaterina died in childbirth. His parents passed away, and he inherited their old wagon. And then David. When the last fragment of his new life had slipped from his fingers, he had pulled the old wagon out of storage and gone on the road, ostensibly as a traveling tinker and knife sharpener, but really to hunt down clockworkers. And when he’d come across the Kalakos Circus eking out performances in Prague, it seemed perfectly natural to join up with them. It was coming home again, in a sad way.

It wasn’t truly the same, of course. Thad kept to himself these days. He avoided making close friends, avoided anything resembling romance. It was easier to pass time alone than to befriend people he would one day lose. Even if it meant being lonely.

Overhead, clouds were drifting in to cover the sun, and the air was chilly. Benny Mazur, the chief clown, stuck his head out of clown alley—the little tent where the clowns got ready—and called something to Nathan Storm, who was just passing by. Nathan nodded, then caught sight of Thad outside his wagon and dashed over, a wide smile on his face.

“Glad to see you’re upright, then,” he said in his light Irish brogue. He clapped Thad on the back. “Wouldn’t want to lose our sword swallower to some stupid pistol accident.”

“I told them,” Sofiya said quickly, “how you were cleaning your equipment and one of your pistols went off.”

“Oh. Yes,” Thad said. “Stupid.”

“And this one.” Nathan swept off his cap, revealing deep red hair, and kissed Sofiya’s hand. “Beautiful and brilliant. I hope you thanked her. She’s our Russian rescuer.”