The Havoc Machine

by Steven Harper

  “You.” Sofiya pointed to one of the drivers. “Perhaps you, Vanka. But also perhaps not. Your cab is shabby and your horse is old. How could I ride with you?”

  “You wound me!” The driver slapped his chest. “Every day I oil the wheels and check the springs. My horse is young and quick! And you can see I am strong and handsome, just for the lady.”

  “I see mud on your fenders, Vanka,” Sofiya pointed out. “If I ride with you, I will become dirty.”

  “He is dirty, too!” called out another driver. “He will take you to unsavory parts of town. My cab is the cleanest in the city.”

  “Saint Petersburg is muddy, alas,” agreed the driver. “But I have special lap robes to protect the lady’s beautiful cloak.”

  This went on for considerable time. Eventually, Sofiya begrudgingly agreed to hire the driver with the lap robes and they settled on a price that seemed to Thad scandalously low, but he kept his mouth shut and boosted Nikolai aboard the cab while the other drivers continued to call out hopeful last-minute pleas and insults.

  “Is it always like that?” Thad asked as Vanka guided the horse away from the curb. Other traffic—carriages, cabs, spiders, automatons, and horses—swirled around them. The horses churned up a steady stream of dirt, and Thad was glad for the lap robes the driver had provided to keep their clothes clean.

  “It is a game,” Sofiya said in English. “Vanka—all the drivers are called that—would be disappointed if we didn’t argue with him. You should see them in winter. They wrap themselves in furs to keep warm, and they look like Siberian bears. If you like him and want to hire him again, you must remember what his beard looks like. All the Vankas comb their beards differently so you can tell them apart.”

  Vanka cracked his whip, and the carriage shot forward. It careened through traffic, dodging around larger carriages and team-hauled lorries. Nikolai wrapped his arms around Thad’s waist with silent strength.

  “Applesauce! Applesauce! Doom!” Dante clung to the back of the carriage and bobbed up and down with excitement. Further conversation was impossible. Thad bounced about the back, and found himself pushing against Sofiya. Half the time she was in his lap, and he found himself noticing how soft she was and how long it had been since he had felt anything like it. He gave himself a mental shake. Sofiya was not someone with whom he wanted to create a romantic relationship.

  But his treacherous mind sketched out scenarios anyway. Nikolai had already declared that the three of them were a family, and in a strange way, they were. What would it be like to be…involved with Sofiya? She was beautiful and intelligent and skilled. He flexed his new hand inside its glove, feeling a strange mixture of gratitude for what she had done and aversion to what was she was. The carriage dashed in a razor-straight line down the street as Thad’s mind flicked ahead and saw the three of them living at the circus, performing afternoons and evenings. Afterward, the three of them would gather in the wagon with a new tent spread over the front. Nikolai would read his book and Thad would sharpen his blades and Sofiya would work on—

  Idiocy. Even if he were interested, Sofiya was a clockworker. Within three years, she would go insane, and Thad had promised to kill her when that happened. Wouldn’t that be a fine thing for a papa to do?

  Vanka barreled around another corner and hauled up short at a large square where a noisy open-air market spread out like a quilt beneath the cloudy autumn sky. No sellers had booths. Some used farm wagons, many walked about with baskets, and some spread their wares out on the ground. A box seller’s boy wearing a long coat four sizes too big for him trudged past with piles of empty boxes strapped to his back. A chimney sweep in a high hat brandished his blackened broom to let people know he was for hire. A farmer stood next to a wheelbarrow heaped with potatoes while a boy waved at people to examine the bright-beaded abacuses spread out on his blanket. A spider with an enormous bowl of sweets on its back wandered about the crowd, accepting small coins in a slot on its back and handing out treats in return. Smells of food, of cooking apples and frying potatoes and baked fish, clashed with smells of unwashed people and raw sewage and rotting garbage.

  Here Thad felt on firmer ground. This market was exactly the same as the ones in Romania and Poland and Ukraine and Lithuania. Sofiya poked Thad and jerked her head at the driver. Thad fumbled with his new hand until he could force it to extract some coins from his pocket for Vanka, who grinned within his carefully combed beard when he saw they were rather more than the sum Sofiya had haggled.

  “I will wait for you, my lord,” he said, and crossed his arms, ready to do just that.

  Sofiya tsked at Thad. “You aren’t supposed to pay them extra. They lose respect for you.”

  “He can tell his children how he bested the foolish foreigner over an extra piece of bread tonight,” Thad said, holding out his arm so Dante could jump aboard. “Come along, Nikolai. Stay close.”

  “Yes, pa—”

  “Don’t,” Thad admonished. “Just don’t.”

  Nikolai made a sound very much like a sigh from inside his scarf and Sofiya gave Thad a hard look.

  “Where should go, then? I assume you know this market,” Thad said.

  Although Thad’s command of Russian was perfectly up to the task, he let Sofiya take the lead, content to let her search for already-made clothing that would fit Nikolai, and haggle over the price while he paid and carried. Sofiya didn’t even bother to have Nikolai try anything on, but instead held shirts or trousers up to him to check color, and Thad remembered that most clockworkers could measure by eye with perfect accuracy. It had never occurred to him that such a skill might come in handy in a textile context.

  Contrary to his earlier threat, Nikolai didn’t complain. For his part, he stood patiently while Sofiya checked this or that, though his large eyes seemed to devour everything around him. Thad wondered what his earliest memory was. Looking up at the ceiling of a laboratory? Or into Havoc’s face? Perhaps Havoc implanted memories into him. It would theoretically be possible to remove any or all of Nikolai’s memories by just changing or removing his wheels. And how would that change Nikolai? Thad found he didn’t like the idea.

  Sofiya bought a basket to carry things in and handed it to Thad along with a shirt for the growing pile. She was choosing the peasant style popular for boys and men—blousy shirts and trousers, a pair of calf-length boots to tuck them in, a furry cap, a long coat. The shopping itself was turning out rather pleasant, as if the three of them were out on a family—

  No. They weren’t a family. Circumstances had forced them together, and one day circumstances would cut them apart. That didn’t make them a family. And Thad didn’t like the fact that Mr. Griffin, a clockworker as ruthless as they came, was running about in Saint Petersburg. Thad’s back itched, and he glanced around the market, looking for Mr. Griffin’s spiders despite Sofiya’s warning. Any moment, he would make a demand of them by threatening the circus and Sofiya’s sister and perhaps even Nikolai. It was living with a sword hanging over his head. His wrist ached. Once they got back to the circus, he would have to start tracking Mr. Griffin down, but carefully. Trouble was, he was at a severe disadvantage. Several disadvantages. His mechanical hand was still new to him. Thad didn’t know Saint Petersburg at all, and he had no friends here. Mr. Griffin had to be aware Thad would be trying to kill him, so there was no element of surprise. Every person in the circus was a hostage to Mr. Griffin’s spiders. The more Thad thought about it, the more impossible it seemed.

  No. He clenched his left hand and forced the fingers to work. He had some control here. Sofiya was a tremendous asset, and so was Nikolai. Thad also had money and weapons and years of experience hunting clockworkers. As a last resort, Thad could bring the circus in on the problem. Mr. Griffin wanted Thad to think he was helpless, and he would not give in.

  Sofiya finished buying a hat for herself, then turned to Thad. “And what did you do with Nikolai?”

  Thad glanced around with a start. Nikolai was nowhere t
o be seen. A cold knife slipped into Thad’s stomach and he spun away from the haberdasher’s blanket to scan the bustling, ever-shifting quilt of the market. Adrenaline zipped through his veins and blood drummed in his ears. He was on the streets of Warsaw again, and David had disappeared. Without a word, he thrust the bundles he was carrying into the arms of the startled hat seller and he rushed away calling Nikolai’s name with Sofiya right behind him.

  “When did you see him last?” Sofiya demanded.

  “Just a moment ago,” Thad growled. “He can’t have gotten far. Nikolai!”

  The crowd swirled around them like confused fish, bumping and shoving and cursing at them. Thad, who was trying to scan the marketplace, stumbled and leaped and stepped on things as he ran, eliciting shouts from merchants and customers alike.

  “Wait!” Sofiya caught his arm. “Thad, wait!”

  “Someone took him!” Thad panted. “We have to find him!”

  “Bad,” said Dante. “Very bad.”

  “We will not find him by blundering about.” She pulled from her pocket a handful of tiny coins and gave one to a beggar girl, and another to a dirty-faced boy. “We are looking for a lost automaton who looks like a little boy. His name is Nikolai. Tell everyone you know the lady in the scarlet cloak will give a quarter kopeck to anyone who helps us look, and fifty kopecks to anyone who finds him.”

  The children fled. Thad forced himself to slow down, fight the panic. He should retrace his steps, see if Nikolai had gone back to the cab, or just followed a familiar route. It was a place to start, at any rate. He turned to do just that. Sofiya spread more coins as they went, attracting more beggars and street children.

  Thad spotted their blue-coated driver, who was dozing in the seat of the cab with his hat pulled down over his eyes. No sign of Nikolai.

  A child in a filthy, heavily patched dress tugged on Sofiya’s cloak and pointed to the mouth of an alley at the edge of the market perhaps twenty yards away. “Is that him, lady?”

  They came to a halt. Nikolai was talking to an adult man and a boy in his teens. The man put his hand on Nikolai’s shoulder, and the three of them faded into the alley.

  “Nikolai!” Thad was already running again, not caring who he hit or stepped on. Sofiya flung a handful of money at the little girl, probably a lifetime of beggar’s income, and bolted after him. They tore down the muddy alley, and the sunlight vanished as if they’d entered a cave. Human refuse and slippery garbage squished and sucked at Thad’s boots, and Sofiya clutched her skirts about her, trying not to trip. Dante clung to Thad’s shoulder so hard his claws pierced the leather jacket and pricked Thad’s skin.

  “Nikolai!” Thad shouted. “Niko!” Buildings of brick and wood and even logs loomed high above them, leaning over the narrow alley and muffling sound. A three-way intersection split the alley ahead of them, and Thad halted, calling Nikolai’s name again.

  “That way!” Sofiya pointed down one of the alleys. “I hear him.”

  For the first time in his life, Thad was glad of a clockworker’s sharp senses. They hurried up the alley, muck and slime still spattering them. Rats the size of shoe boxes grudgingly gave way, and someone from above emptied a chamber pot, missing them by inches and splashing Thad’s trousers. Thad ran on.

  And then Thad saw a doorway. The man and the teenaged boy were there with Nikolai and two more men, all hovering like wraiths in the dim, fetid shadows. Thad rushed toward them as best he could over the slippery mud. The men, dressed in ragged peasant clothes, came alert.

  “You have Nikolai,” Thad said in Russian. “He belongs to me. Give him back.”

  “Yours, friend?” said the first man. “We found an automaton wandering around the market with no owner in sight and no papers on him to prove who he belongs to. That makes him ours, free and clear. He’s worth something.”

  Thad dropped into the role of hunter. A cold feeling of balance came over him, the same feeling he had when he slid a sword into his throat in the ring. Emotion slipped away, leaving behind nothing but the edge of a knife and allowing him to assess everything around him. Two of the men were shorter than he, but broader and more muscular. The leader was taller than Thad and proportionately heavier. The boy was young and thin. Thad noted two knives and a cudgel. There might have been other weapons he couldn’t see. Automatically he brought his hands down to pop his own spring-loaded blades into palms, and then remembered that he hadn’t strapped them on—he’d been too discombobulated by his new hand and by Sofiya’s presence in his wagon while he was dressing to remember knives or a pistol. He dug a foot into the squelching mixture of mud and shit and switched to English, which he doubted the men understood.

  “Nikolai, are you all right?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I didn’t know—”

  “Everything will be fine.” Sofiya held up a hand and spoke again in Russian. “These respectable men found you and they are returning you to us, and that is a fine thing. No one will get hurt now.”

  “Doom,” said Dante.

  “So?” said the leader. “Perhaps that is not true. Perhaps we will—”

  Thad didn’t bother listening to the rest. He kicked a bootful of muck into the leader’s face. The leader yowled like an angry cat and Thad went for the man with the cudgel. Dante leaped free as Thad rammed a shoulder into the man, who went down. Unfortunately, Thad slipped and went with him. They fell in a tangle of arms and legs to the stinking mud. The man clouted Thad on the side of the head. There was no pain—not yet—and Thad slammed the heel of his brass palm under the man’s chin. There was a crack and the man went limp. Thad rolled free.

  The leader cleared his eyes and the third man was moving in on Sofiya. He snapped out a hand and grabbed her wrist. Sofiya blinked at him, like a barracuda deigning to notice a minnow that had bumped it. In a blur of movement, she wrenched the third man around and slammed him face-first into the wall. Her foot lashed up behind her, despite her skirts, and caught the leader in the midriff. The leader folded, and with catlike speed Sofiya spun in time to smash his face into her knee. Clockworker reflexes. The man whose face went into the wall slid down into the mud. Sofiya, her face a mask of ice, kicked the leader in the head. He twitched and went still.

  To Thad’s complete surprise, Nikolai slammed the heel of his own palm under the teenaged boy’s chin in an exact duplicate of Thad’s movement, then lashed up with his foot just like Sofiya had done to catch him in the knee—he couldn’t reach the midriff. The teenaged boy dropped, groaning, into the mud.

  “Sharpe is…sharrrrrrp.” Dante was sitting breast deep in muck, his exposed gears grinding. “Dooooommm…” His voice slowed and faded.

  “Shit.” Thad levered himself to hands and knees. His head was hurting now. “Damn it all!”

  “Shit,” Nikolai said. “Damn it all!”

  “Don’t you start.” Thad tried to wipe smelly mud from his face and only succeeded in smearing it around. “Those words are for adults, not…automatons.”

  “He does everything you do and listens to everything you say.” Sofiya straightened her skirts and cloak and produced a handkerchief. “You know this.”

  “Are you all right, Nikolai?” Thad asked.

  “I’m all right,” he said. “They didn’t hurt me, but I think they would have. They said you had left the market and sent them to take me home.”

  “Why didn’t you fight them like you did that boy?”

  Nikolai shrugged. “I didn’t know how until now.”

  Thad got to his feet. The alley swayed for a moment, and he braced himself against the wall until it settled down. The men who had attacked them didn’t move, though the boy still moaned softly. Thad took their knives away and examined them. Even in the dim light of the alley, he could see they were dull and of poor workmanship. A poor man’s tool, not even worth throwing away.

  “What do we do with them?” he asked. “I’ve half a mind to saw their hands off.”

  “Certainly not.” Sofiya was using t
he handkerchief to wipe muck off Nikolai’s face. “We will give them money and let them go.”

  He stared at her. “Are you insane?” he blurted, and then, flushing, wished he could take the final word back.

  “The famed clockwork madness has not begun for me yet.” She calmly put her handkerchief away without offering it to Thad, probably because it wouldn’t have done any good, then sprinkled a few coins over the men like a fairy godmother dropping golden tears on sleeping children. “We must go now. Don’t forget Dante.”

  The wet, sewage-ridden muck was soaking through Thad’s gloves. He peeled them off, tossed them away, and gingerly plucked Dante from the alley floor. This time Sofiya offered up a handkerchief to wrap him in. They trudged back in the direction from which they had come, making sure Nikolai walked where they could see him. Nikolai stayed close, in any case.

  “Look around you, Thad,” Sofiya said before he could ask about the money again. “This is how most of the people in Saint Petersburg live.”

  She pulled them into a muddy street that was only slightly wider than the alley. Rickety buildings with ill-fitting doors and shutters leaned drunkenly over the byway. Men in ragged peasant clothing mingled with women in dirty head cloths. Children who had never seen a bath and whose clothes could barely be called clothing appeared to be playing in the street, but when Thad looked closer, he realized they were scavenging through the garbage and offal. The thick smell of human waste was omnipresent. People stared at the trio and their rich clothing as they passed, and they were quickly surrounded by children begging for coins. Thad kept a tight grip on his money.

  “I will work for you, my lady,” said a boy. “Whatever you say. I will carry for you and sweep the street for you. Half a kopeck!”

  “I will lie with you for two kopecks, my lord,” said a girl who wasn’t more than ten. “Even one and a half!”

  Thad threw a handful of coins into the street, and the children bolted for them while he, Sofiya, and Nikolai hurried away past more hungry eyes that watched from doors and windows. Here there were no shops, no storekeepers, nothing to buy or sell but labor and human flesh itself, and all of it far too inexpensive. Thad heard shuffling. A small pack of plague zombies, the first ones he’d seen since leaving Vilnius, shambled through shadows near the mouth of an alley, avoiding the light. They were naked, not even a rag to cover themselves. Their hair hung in filthy strings, and their flesh was already rotting away from their bones as the plague ate its way through their bodies. Thad shied away automatically, and hoped they would die soon, partly so they stop spreading the plague and partly out of simple mercy. There was nothing to do for them, no way to cure them, no method of giving them comfort without risking contraction of the disease. Even putting a bullet through a zombie’s brain spread the plague in a spray of ichor and blood. The folk on the street knew it, too, and like Thad, they shied away from the alley.