The Havoc Machine

by Steven Harper

  “Dante,” he said at last.

  “Doom,” said Dante. “Death, despair.”

  “Go.”

  “Applesauce,” Dante replied stubbornly.

  Thad plucked the parrot from his shoulder and threw him without ceremony toward the vines. Dante arced sideways into the green curtain with a surprised whistle and vanished. He was too damaged to fly, if he had ever been able to. Thad waited, not sure if he wanted the mechanical bird to disappear forever or not. It might be nice if the universe decided it for him. Thad couldn’t bring himself to believe in God. Not anymore.

  “Dante?” he called.

  Silence. Then another whistle, but muffled somehow. Was that a good sign or bad? Thad couldn’t tell, and the fact that he couldn’t tell made him uncertain and nervous. With a quick gesture, Thad pulled from his pocket a short brass baton. He pressed a button, and it sprang into its full four-foot length with a clack. Cautiously, he used it to push the vines aside. Again, nothing. He moved through the clingy, green-smelling curtain—

  —and nearly fell into a black pit. Thad hung there at the edge like a tightrope walker, not quite falling in but unable to draw himself back. The greedy pit gaped before him, trying to swallow him down. Stones made teeth around the edges, and Dante was grimly holding on to one of them with his beak. Thad hung there, caught between life and death. For a mad moment, he thought about giving up and simply letting himself drop into the dark. It would be easy, and any pain would end quickly. All his pain would end quickly. Then the weight of the vodka jug in his jacket pocket slowly pulled him backward until he regained enough equilibrium to put both feet on firm ground.

  “Idiot,” he muttered to himself. This was what had bothered him—he hadn’t heard the rock hit the ground. He collapsed the staff and returned it to his pocket.

  “Bless my soul.” Dante whistled pointedly from the pit’s edge. Thad picked the parrot up and set him back on his shoulder. Dante bit him on the ear. Pain lanced through Thad’s head, and he felt a trickle of blood.

  “Ow!” Angry, Thad snatched Dante off again and held him over the pit. “Listen, birdbrain, I’ll drop you in, and see if I don’t.”

  “I love you, Daddy. I love you, Daddy.”

  “No, you don’t. And if you say that again without permission, I’ll melt you down in Havoc’s forge while I watch.”

  “Applesauce.”

  “I said, shut it.” But Thad put Dante back on his shoulder again.

  Once he knew the pit was there, it was easy enough to edge around it and onto the grounds of the keep. That brought Thad to one of the long sides of the rectangle that made up the inner castle. Ruined outbuildings backed up against the main wall, and an overgrown courtyard with a well and spaces for gardens spread out ahead of him. Thad flicked a calculating glance at the outbuildings—sometimes clockworkers used what had once been the blacksmith’s forge for their own work—but he saw no evidence of such activity. He sighed. It was too much to hope that Mr. Havoc would be outside, where he would be easy to reach.

  Thad ghosted across the courtyard toward the main building, already falling into a familiar rhythm: dash a few steps, pause, scan for danger, dash a few steps. Stay to the shadows. Watch for anything that glowed or gave off heat.

  A rustling in the grass to his left made the revolver leap into his hand. The hammer clicked under his thumb. Then the shape of a rat skittered away, and Thad relaxed. Dante cocked his head but was wise enough to remain silent.

  Thad oozed up to the main keep, wishing he knew something—anything—about the layout of the interior. Most keeps were built around a main hall, with side chambers for everything from storage to arms to living quarters. Clockworkers needed space, so the main hall was the most likely place to start. One major problem was that clockworkers could—and usually did—go for days without sleeping, so Thad wouldn’t be able to slip up on Havoc while he snored in a bed.

  A number of doors both small and large faced the courtyard. A pair of small ones opened onto the garden area, and the large double doors in the center of the high wall stood shut like pair of giants holding back the darkness. Enormous shiny locks held them closed, and the locks had visible teeth in the keyholes. One keyhole gnashed open and shut with an audible clack even as Thad examined them from several paces back. He didn’t fancy finding a way around that. He glanced up. Like most keeps, the windows were high and narrow, more arrow slit than anything. The top floor of the keep had crumbled away, but the lower stories were still solid, and Thad saw no way in besides the doors. Another rat nearly ran over his foot, and he jumped back, suppressing an oath. Dante clacked his beak, but didn’t comment.

  Thad thought a long moment, then went back to the pit and peered into it. It would have to do. He took out the silk rope, tied one end to a sturdy sapling near the edge, and before he could think too hard about what he was doing, he lowered himself down like a mountain climber. The soft silk kept his palms from burning as he slid into the pit’s dark throat, and Thad had to force himself to keep his breathing steady. Dante gripped his shoulder, apparently unconcerned. The descent went on and on. Thad’s muscles ached, and it soon seemed as if he’d been climbing through darkness forever. Sweat trickled from his hair down his collar. The only sounds were his own breath and the little ticks and rustles made as he slid carefully downward, bracing himself against the earthen side of the pit.

  At last the sounds changed. There was that ineffable shift in noise, and he sensed that the bottom of the pit was close under him. Still cautious, he put his feet down even as his forearms and shoulders screamed for mercy, and touched solid floor. He sighed with relief. Something skittered away from him—more rats, no doubt. Thad fished a candle from his pocket and scratched a sulfur match to light it.

  “Bad boy, bad boy,” Dante said softly.

  Thad ignored him and raised the candle. The light revealed a simple earthen pit, as he had been expecting. It also revealed a grated gate set in one wall, as he had been hoping. The padlock that held it shut was simple.

  “Ha,” he said under his breath.

  Havoc hadn’t left the castle gate unsecured in a moment of foolishness, as Sofiya had thought. The crafty bugger had left it open as bait. Thad had seen this kind of thing before. More than one person had used the gate to enter the castle, fallen into the pit, and become fodder for Havoc’s experiments. It was also why there were no alarms or automaton guards—Havoc wanted people to come in. The place was a gingerbread house.

  Dante obligingly held the candle in one claw while Thad’s picks got the lock open. No need to put heavy security on a gate when the people on the other side were suffering from broken bones. A tunnel beyond it led beneath the courtyard and, Thad assumed, straight into the keep. He took the candle back from Dante and cautiously moved down the tunnel. It was probably safe to assume that the tunnel would be unguarded and without traps for the same reason the gate had been only lightly locked, but the paranoia Sofiya had mentioned earlier forced him to stay alert. He watched for wires and irregularities in the earthen floor and anything at all that looked like brass or steam. But he saw nothing except a dank earthen tunnel braced with wood.

  What was Havoc like? Sofiya had had little information to give him. The moniker Mr. indicated he was a man, but how old was he? What did he look like? How had he encountered the clockwork plague? Did he have relatives? Children? What had become of them?

  Thad tried to clamp down on the last line of thought, but the tunnel offered few distractions, and it came along even so. Once the plague took a clockworker’s mind, he—or she—didn’t care about people. All that mattered was the experiment, the science, the invention. Thad had come across his third clockworker in the process of making an airship out of human skin. His second had perfected a vivisection device and had gone from testing it on dogs and cats to apes stolen from a zoo and finally to people—five in all, including two children. And his first clockworker—

  The candle held back the darkness, but not the
guilt. It closed around Thad like a fist and stole his breath. He had to force himself to keep walking.

  His first clockworker…

  Thad still couldn’t put it into words. David was his life seemed trite, or maybe just understated, like saying it was nice to have air when you lived underwater. His dear Ekaterina had died in the birthing bed, leaving Thad the sole and frightened caretaker of a crying, pink bundle of curiosity with his mother’s blue eyes and red-brown hair. Thad had considered running back to the circus, the one he had left to marry Ekaterina in the first place, but Ekaterina’s mother had persuaded him to stay, and Thad had realized that with David in his life, it would be easier to stay on in Warsaw as a knife sharpener and tinsmith than return to his parents’ life of knife throwing and stage magic.

  The early years had been difficult. Thad had no interest in remarrying, which meant he took care of both business and home, though Ekaterina’s aging mother helped as best she could. David grew quickly and got into everything, a dangerous prospect in the shop of a knife man, and Thad found himself almost slavishly devoted to this small, yet strangely enormous, presence in his life. David, for his part, clung ferociously to his father. With a sense of wonder and awe, Thad watched David learn to walk, run, play with other children, ask to help in the little shop, and every day Thad saw something of Ekaterina in him—her laugh, her hair, her smile.

  The two of them soldiered through life together. Together they endured hard work and loneliness and even the death of Ekaterina’s mother one long winter. Slowly, Thad began to heal. When David was six, Thad scraped up the money to enroll him in school and endured the little pang in his heart each day when David left in the morning and suffered the little sting when he returned in the afternoon to talk about students and teachers and playmates Thad had never met.

  And then one afternoon, David didn’t return home. At first Thad thought nothing of it. David had simply gotten caught up in a game with some other boys or paused at the sweets shop again. But as the afternoon turned to evening, Thad became worried, then frightened, then frantic. He barely remembered the hours of searching, of asking everyone along David’s route home what they had seen, until a baker, in his shop for the night’s baking, mentioned seeing a boy matching David’s description, right down to the color of his shirt and the school books flung over his back. The baker had seen the boy get into a carriage—or perhaps he’d been snatched, the baker wasn’t certain. What the man did remember was that the carriage bore the crest of the mayor.

  Thad stiffened. Mayor Teodor de Langeron, a prince of French and Russian descent, had no sons, but rumor had it that one of his numerous nephews had contracted the clockwork plague. Some of the wilder speculations said he’d become a clockworker.

  And it was quite impossible to expect the police to interfere in the affairs of a prince’s family.

  Even now, Thad only vaguely recalled stripping the knife shop of its blades and digging out his old stage-magic trunk. He did remember posing as a servant to get onto the palace grounds where the mayor’s family lived and terrorizing a young maid into telling him where to find the nephew, who was already insisting that people call him Lord Power instead of by his birth name Henryk, a clear sign that the plague had taken his mind. Lord Power lived in cellars beneath the palace, another sign.

  Fortunately for Thad, Lord Power still felt safe in his family home and hadn’t decided to build traps yet. Thad only ran across this habit later. Every step along the endless cellar corridors and storerooms was a nightmare. Twice he got lost and had to backtrack. Another time his candle went out, and his hands were shaking so hard, he couldn’t relight it. A piping cry for help brought his head around. David’s voice! He followed the sound, terrified. Every delay meant more pain for David. Thad rounded a stony corner and the cry for help sounded right in his ear. Thad swiped at the sound by reflex and knocked a brass parrot off a wall perch. It clanged to the floor, knocking its beak askew.

  “Danger! Danger!” the parrot squawked. “Master! Danger!”

  Thad kicked it, and the parrot smashed into the wall. It lost an eye and several metal feathers. “Shut it!” Thad snarled.

  In answer, the parrot screamed for help in David’s voice again. The sound turned Thad’s blood to ice. The bird was somehow reproducing David’s voice, and that meant Lord Power was probably somewhere nearby. A door just down the corridor showed a crack of light at the bottom. Thad smashed into it without hesitation. The damp wood gave way and he stumbled into the room beyond.

  Small cages lined the walls. Each contained a bloody, mangled human corpse. Shelves of dreadful equipment took up one wall, and the top shelf was lined with enormous jars of clear fluid, each with a white label—OIL OF VITRIOL, SPIRITS OF SALT, AQUA FORTIS. Near the shelves stood an operating table with a bloody sheet draped over it. Standing next to it was a tall man with a potbelly and a receding hairline. He was training a complicated-looking crossbow on Thad.

  “Dante gave me plenty of warning,” Lord Power said just as the mechanical parrot waddled into the room. “Don’t move, and don’t think about throwing that knife.”

  Thad gripped the blade. He didn’t even remember drawing it. “I’ll kill you.”

  “Not with that,” Lord Power said. “Don’t you know? I am a clockworker—smarter, faster, better than you. Throw that knife at me, and I will catch it in midair.”

  The figure beneath the sheet whimpered. David! Thad’s heart twisted, but he forced himself to concentrate on the clockworker and his crossbow. Dante, for reasons of his own, jumped up onto the table beside David and cocked his head.

  “How lucky am I?” Lord Power continued. “I take one subject off the street, and a second one follows him in. You know, I learned so much when I sliced this boy’s—”

  Thad threw the knife. Lord Power warily watched it come, but it arced high over his head.

  “My turn.” Power re-aimed the crossbow with a giggle just as the knife crashed handle first into the jar marked OIL OF VITRIOL. Glass shattered, and the sulfuric acid inside cascaded over Power’s head and face. Smoke rose from his flesh, and he screamed in agony. The crossbow clattered to the floor. Lord Power screamed and screamed and screamed. The acid dissolved his hair and skin, revealing his skull. Power clawed at the remains of his face, but that only got the acid on the flesh of his hands, which also began to dissolve. Thad ran forward, snatched up the crossbow, and fired it into the man’s chest. Power stiffened, then dropped twitching to the floor.

  “Bless my soul,” Dante said.

  Thad flung the bow aside and tore the sheet away from the table.

  In that moment, Thad understood how much he’d been hoping the figure under the sheet wasn’t David. That was how it worked in stories—the hero rips the barrier away, but surprise! The figure under the sheet is an animal or a dummy or another poor soul, someone you could feel sorry for even as you felt a guilty relief that it wasn’t your son. But the wreck on the table was undeniably his little boy David. The world closed around Thad’s heart like a rock and his knees buckled.

  “Daddy?” David said in English. His eyes were shut and his voice was blurred, as if he were sleepy. “Daddy.”

  Thad dropped the sheet back over David’s body with shaking hands. “I’m here. Daddy’s here, little star. The bad man is gone. Does…does it hurt?”

  “I’m cold,” David whispered. His breathing was slow and it had bubbles in it. “I’m cold.”

  Thad didn’t know what to do. His son was dying, and he could do nothing but watch. Why hadn’t he come a few minutes before? Why hadn’t he started searching just one hour earlier? When he sent David off to school that morning with a meat roll in his hand for breakfast, he’d had no way of knowing that this would be the last time he’d ever see David alive.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy.” David coughed, and blood spattered his lip.

  The pain in his voice made Thad have to lean on the table, and tears choked the back of his throat. He smoothed the hair on Davi
d’s forehead. “Why are you sorry, little star?” Little star was a name Thad had stopped using with David years ago, but he now found himself going back to it.

  “I should…have…run…”

  “No!” Thad couldn’t bear the thought that his dear, sweet boy would go into the afterlife feeling guilty. He hugged David despite the bloody sheet. “No, little star! It was my fault for not coming after you sooner. You are not to blame. Please believe me.” He was weeping openly now. He fumbled under the sheet for David’s hand and accidentally knocked Dante over. The parrot twitched.

  “Recording,” Dante said. “Recording.”

  “I…I…” David’s voice was growing fainter, and his hand was growing colder. “I…”

  “What?” Thad pleaded.

  “I love you, Daddy.” David exhaled once more and died.

  Before he left the lab with David in his bloody shroud over one shoulder and Dante clinging to the other, Thad broke every jar and bottle he could find and dropped a candle into the mess. The liquid blazed up like a hungry demon. Thad didn’t stay to watch it burn. The last thing he saw was the flames licking the corpse of the clockworker. How many brothers and sisters in darkness did this creature have? How many clockworkers giggled behind their knives and needs, their machines and mechanicals?

  “One less,” Thad spat. “And tomorrow, one more less. There will always be one more less.”

  * * *

  The tunnel under the castle widened into a dungeon. They always did. Thad did a quick check in the cells but found no prisoners in evidence. Strange. Usually he found at least one. Perhaps they were kept somewhere else.

  He found the usual spiral staircase and used his collapsible baton to poke and prod his way upward. Nothing leaped out, no stairs collapsed, no terrible liquids gushed down toward him. At least the clockworker had installed glowing lights of some kind, however meager. The entire place looked dirty and gray. He emerged at the end of a long corridor and almost stumbled into an automaton.