The Circus of Machinations

by Chris Ward

  Patricia wasn’t like an old car that needed warming up. From the moment she opened her eyes she was struggling to get at Victor, her anger expressed by a series of muffled shrieks and snarls that no doubt encompassed the worst curses ever coined by humanity. Kurou had also had the foresight to tie her wrists to the leg of a heavy old chair, otherwise, she might well have attempted to bludgeon Victor to death using only her shoulders, elbows and knees. As she struggled now in front of him, Victor couldn’t help feeling a little regretful that he had saved her. It had been enough trouble dealing with Kurou. Now he would have to sleep with both eyes open.

  ‘Look, I know what you’re thinking,’ he said as she struggled and kicked. ‘I didn’t kill your brother. It was an accident.’

  Patricia’s eyes bulged. Her arms, battered and bloody from her fall, strained at the bonds.

  ‘I know you hate me and you don’t want to hear any excuses, but I’m sorry. I really wish it hadn’t happened, but he did attack me—twice, I might add.’

  Behind her, Kurou was lying on his back, squealing with laughter. Victor began to feel like he was in the middle of some absurdist freak show. He had to remind himself that he was in a room with a deformed killer who had not only booby-trapped the cart to shoot deadly projectiles at its enemies, but who also feasted on harvested human flesh.

  Patricia, perhaps realising the futility of her continued resistance, had calmed down. She watched him through eyes as damning as hot coals as he muttered excuse after excuse. He tried to promise her freedom and a return to her family, but with Kurou in complete control it was possible neither of them might go home alive. If Victor could get Patricia to side with him then they might be able to help each other escape from the professor, but it was unlikely. She seemed certain he was responsible for her twin brother’s death.

  Finally, Kurou stood up and ambled over. He squatted down behind Patricia’s chair and laid two bony hands over her shoulders.

  She immediately froze. She looked up at the face leaning on her left shoulder and her breath shortened. The prankster that brought a sun of sorts through the clouds of Kurou’s visage was nowhere to be seen; the demon that Victor had first encountered was in full attendance. Patricia, for all her attitude, had never encountered a creature such as this, and was barely controlling the urge to cry.

  ‘Hush, hush, my princess,’ Kurou whispered, his voice a gravelly sound like sand paper dragging over stones. ‘Calm your sweet mind. Your brother chose his own death by his actions. I’m afraid it is a common trait among your species.’ He lifted a finger and ran it down the side of her cheek. ‘It would be a shame for you to choose your own death so soon.’

  Tears filled Patricia’s eyes. The angry, violent young woman had become a child beneath Kurou’s touch.

  ‘Who saw you enter?’ Kurou asked. ‘Will they try to dig you out?’

  ‘No—no one,’ she stammered. ‘It was dark.’

  ‘How tragic,’ Kurou whistled. ‘A travesty that could grace great literature.’

  The fire was dying down. Kurou’s lights flickered, and the cold that had been licking at the edges of everything began to sneak ever closer. Victor was grateful for his shirt and jacket, and even Kurou had pulled a thin tunic on over his body.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Victor said. ‘We can’t just sit here.’

  Kurou shrugged. ‘We can, sire. I have enough food for several weeks now that you and the princess are here.’

  Patricia screamed. ‘You can’t eat us!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because—because you can’t. We’re human beings!’

  ‘The taste of which I can at least tolerate,’ Kurou said. ‘If no suitable alternative is present.’

  ‘It’s not safe to stay here,’ Victor said. ‘What if the rest of the building collapses?’

  Kurou’s neck creaked as he turned towards Victor. He looked like a badly decomposed corpse suddenly reanimated. ‘So what do you suggest?’

  ‘The chimney. It’s the only way.’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  Kurou stood up and waved Victor towards the fireplace with a flourish of his hand. Victor turned towards it, then looked back at Kurou.

  ‘Perhaps we should formulate a plan.’

  Kurou rolled his eyes. ‘I’ll leave it for your consideration, sire,’ he said. ‘I’m tiring of this conversation.’ He started towards the kitchen, but as he passed Patricia he paused for a moment, resting one finger on her chin and lifting it up towards him.

  ‘I had a daughter once,’ he sighed, then before she could answer, he had gone.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I don’t think he’s going to eat us,’ Victor said, keeping his voice low. ‘I think he actually likes the company, but we’d probably be best to do what he says, just in case.’

  ‘What is that thing?’

  ‘His name is Kurou. I’m not exactly sure what he is, but he’s a genius with machines. It was his modifications to my robot that … killed your brother.’

  Patricia stared at him for a long time. Victor felt too magnetized by her gaze to either look away or respond. Instead, he found his cheeks turning red with a mixture of discomfort, guilt and shame.

  ‘Never ever mention my brother again,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered, his voice coming out like a croak. Patricia scowled and looked away.

  The awkward silence was penetrated by Kurou marching back into the room with a coil of rope hung over one shoulder. He dropped it on the floor and then squatted down beside Victor with one end held in his hands.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘If we’re going to climb out of that chimney we should practice climbing safety, Kurou said. ‘Hold still.’

  Victor was too afraid to move as Kurou tied the rope around his ankle in an elaborate knot, then picked a piece of burning wood from the edge of the flames and melted part of the rope to seal it in place.

  ‘It would be most ungrateful of you to try to escape,’ he said. ‘After everything I’ve done for you.’

  ‘I—I wouldn’t.’

  Kurou patted him on the knee. ‘Of course, you wouldn’t. I trust you, sire. Just airing my concerns.’

  Victor stared at the dying embers of the fire. Pretty soon the chimney would be the only place in the whole apartment with any residue of warmth. It would be worth the climb for that alone, but the thought of hauling his way up that tunnel of black soot filled him with dread.

  ‘Does the chimney go all the way to the top of the building?’ he asked.

  Kurou shook his head. ‘Oh, no, sire. Can you imagine the cleaning that would take? It surfaces at ground level.’

  ‘How high is the climb?’

  ‘Oh, sixty or seventy metres.’ We’re buried deeper than the Cretaceous.’

  Victor gulped. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to try to get out through the stairwell’s rubble?’

  Kurou shook his head. ‘While you were freeing the young lady, I took the liberty of having a look around. It seems we’re trapped. Of course, you’re welcome to try, wasting valuable time while our resources dwindle and the cold sets in. Not an unwelcome sensation on a body such as mine, I might add.’

  ‘Do you have anything we can use to climb with?’

  Kurou cocked his head and gave Victor a crooked smile. With the uneven tufts of hair protruding from his scalp he looked like a remarkably ugly hatchling. ‘Only what you brought with you, sire. I’m a man of few means, so I am.’

  Behind the visage of helplessness, Victor knew Kurou was hiding something from him. Probably many things. All of this was a test, he felt, to see if he was worth keeping alive. Kurou might be enjoying their company, but he was a man of many guises. He could switch faces in a moment and find both Victor and Patricia surplus to requirements without any hint of regret. If Victor wanted to keep himself and the girl alive until they had a chance to escape, he had to prove his value.

  ‘It’s made of bricks, isn’t it?’ he said, mostly to himself.
He went over to the dying fireplace and peered up, the rope going taut around his foot as Kurou stayed where he was. It was wider than those in private apartments might have been, used perhaps more frequently down in this basement room, but still no more than around forty centimetres square. Victor was the most heavyset of the three of them, but still fairly slight compared to most Russian men. Even with his coat he could just fit, and while the squeeze would be claustrophobic and suffocating, it would count in his favour if the bricks were uneven enough to allow him a grip.

  In a show of confidence, he began to kick out the remaining embers of the fire. ‘Ready when you are,’ he said, feeling anything but.

  Kurou spent a few minutes making a brace for Patricia, then tying and sealing the far end of the rope around the girl’s waist. He cut her legs free so she could steady herself against the chimney walls, but refused to free her arms even though the obvious logic suggested the threat of her attacking them from the bottom of the chimney shaft was worth the risk of giving her the means to climb. Kurou, though, seemed to consider everything a big adventure.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  Victor didn’t even bother trying to hold a torch. This was one climb where he didn’t want to know how far he had gone, or how much further was left. Kurou helped him climb up into the shaft, where he braced his back against one wall of the filthy chimney and jammed his feet against the other. He had brought a couple of screwdrivers with him to possibly jam into gaps in the stone, but it was uneven enough that he could get a grip with his gloves, lift himself a few inches, then move his feet up.

  Climbing upwards was a painful, uncomfortable process. He could see nothing, not even the walls of the shaft around him. He knew that if he slipped his momentum would take Kurou and Patricia down with him, yet every few steps the rope would go taut as Kurou struggled to keep up, and Victor would have a few seconds to sit quietly in the dark, listening to the breathing of the others, punctuated by bursts of Kurou’s cackling laughter, while trying to ignore the clogging stench of decades of accumulated soot.

  He had been climbing for about half an hour, inch by resilient inch, when he saw the first glimmer of light above him. He had suspected that day had come while he had been struggling to free Patricia, but the exact passage of time was measured only by the growing aches and pains in his body.

  At some point about halfway up, Patricia had started crying. Her sobbing floated up through the shaft like bubbles, her misery encasing him. Kurou had fallen silent as if listening to it like sweet music, and Victor wondered how much of it was worry at their predicament, and how much was a mixture of delayed shock and grief at the loss of her brother.

  The glimmer of light above him grew brighter. It looked so small and distant, a pinprick of hope. He steeled himself, gritted his teeth, and began to move upwards with greater urgency.

  He came upon it in a rush, but his excitement was quashed when he saw the chimney shaft ended in a circular concrete tube, barely wide enough for him to reach an arm through. Set into bricks, it was clogged with soot, but effectively sealed them into the shaft.

  They were stuck. There was no way out.

  Below him, Kurou was coming up, the sound of his movements scraping and sharp like a hermit crab digging its way out of an undersized shell.

  ‘We’re stuck,’ Victor said, his first words aloud since they had begun climbing. ‘There’s no way through.’

  ‘There’s always a way, sire,’ Kurou said, his breathing ragged. ‘Aren’t you an inventor? Invent us a way out.’

  Victor braced himself and then reached up a hand into the tube. The sudden gust of cold air on his hand was so comforting he almost wept.

  ‘You said this opened out on the back of the building. Which side is inside, which is out?’

  Kurou chuckled. ‘Sire, use your head. Can’t you tell from the breeze?’

  Victor scowled. It was clear Kurou was going to be of no help at all. Again he got the impression this was some sort of test.

  He pulled off his glove and tucked it into his jacket. Then he reached up again, holding his fingers out in the freezing air. The breeze seemed to be coming from his back, but what did that mean? Would the air wrap around the building or be deflected by it?

  He tried to remember the layout of the building, of the orientation of Kurou’s apartment, but he had lost count of the turns of the stairwell, and his fear had stripped him of his sense of direction.

  He opened his mouth to speak, then came up with another idea. He pulled his hand back down, but instead of putting his glove back on, he put his hand against the stone of the shaft walls, feeling through the accumulated soot to try to get at the rock itself.

  On both sides the bricks were cold, but they were a little colder at his back than in front of him.

  ‘It’s here,’ he said. ‘Behind my back.’

  ‘Very good, sire. How do we get out?’

  Victor pulled a screwdriver out of his jacket pocket and handed it down to Kurou, keeping the second for himself. ‘We dig,’ he said.

  The mortar was old, weakened by heat and cold and most recently the bombing. It took Victor just a couple of minutes to locate a brick that was already lose and begin chipping away at it. He warned Patricia to keep the hood over her head in case of any falling pieces of rock, but the mortar was crumbly and came away in grains.

  Ten minutes later, Victor pushed against the brick and it slid outwards, revealing the inside of a drift of snow. A few minutes of hacking at the packed ice and they had light enough to see, and a space for more dislodged bricks.

  ‘A little chilly for you, is it?’ Kurou whispered.

  ‘Just keep digging or we’ll freeze to death long before we get out of here.’

  ‘As you command, sire,’ Kurou answered with a cackle.

  Below them, Patricia was silent. Victor could sense her presence, but jammed into the tiny space there was only enough room for Kurou to reach up and help Victor chip away at the loose mortar, leaving Patricia down in the dark. He felt a mixture of guilt for the girl’s predicament and unease at her next move. She might understand that her brother’s death wasn’t Victor’s fault, but that didn’t mean she forgave him for his involvement. He would do well to avoid turning his back to her.

  Victor broke away another brick, making the space wide enough for his head to fit through. A couple more and they would be able to get out.

  And then Kurou screamed as Patricia jerked on the rope, sending him tumbling back down the shaft. Victor grabbed hold of a crag of protruding brick, wrapping his arms around it and bracing his legs a moment before the rope yanked his ankle so hard he thought it must have broken right through. Below him he heard the sounds of a scuffle, but unable to help, all he could do was hang on, and hope that their combined weight wouldn’t send all three of them plummeting down the shaft to their deaths.

  18

  The Machinations of War

  Richard Karhov pulled up the morning’s orders on the monitor and quickly read over them. Satisfied that he knew what he needed to know in order to carry them out, he got up from his desk and wandered over to the coffee machine in the corner. All around him the click and clack of relentless typing filled the air like the buzzing of hundreds of mechanical bees. It was interesting sometimes how old-school some of his colleagues were. Allowed to choose the component parts of their individual workstations from the immense deposits of junked hardware that rose in near mountains of forgotten technology in the warehouses around the base, many had chosen geriatric monitors or keyboards with big, heavy keys, and great walls of fan-assisted hard drive units that rose up around them nearly as high as the walls of the cubicles themselves. Far fewer had chosen the newer touch-screen tablets, the embedded table top monitors and the laptops small enough to fit in your pocket; if your workstation was a reflection of your personality, then it was clear that nostalgia for the old days permeated the base like a heavy but welcome perfume.

  ‘What did you get today?’ he
asked the girl standing nearest the coffee machine, a plastic cup held up in two hands to her mouth as she blew gently on to its surface.

  Miranda gave him a little smile from beneath a mop of brown hair that ballooned around her head as if gravity were rejecting it.

  ‘You know we’re not supposed to talk about it,’ she said. ‘Is that some poor cover at asking me out on a date?’

  Richard smiled. ‘You know I’d never do that. Just wondering, that’s all.’

  Miranda shrugged. ‘The usual. False weather reports here, edited news footage there. Oh, and a radio broadcast I have to doctor. Should be fun.’

  ‘Oh, I know you don’t mean that.’

  ‘You know what I heard?’ Miranda said, deflecting the conversation away from small talk. ‘I heard that we’re being inspected later today. You hear that?’

  Richard frowned. ‘No. Where’d you hear that?’

  ‘On the secure line.’

  ‘I don’t bother with that. I trust it no more than the unsecure ones. There are the instructions that come in every morning and nothing else.’

  Miranda’s face hardened as if she found his display of devotion to duty upsetting. ‘I’m happy for you, Richard, I really am. I’m sure you’ll pass the inspection with flying colours.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  Their conversation seemed to be over by mutual consent. Richard gave Miranda a polite nod and then headed back to his cubicle. Thoughts of the impending inspection filled his mind. Things happened every time they had one, usually someone getting pulled up and removed for a display of failure that couldn’t be measured in real terms.

  The last time, a little over a month ago, a man named Larkin had been removed and replaced without warning. Larkin had scored higher in the commission charts than Richard had, and outwardly had been a model employee. No one knew what had happened to him, but there were rumours, of course. Rumours and reports and video footage, none of which could be verified beyond something that might or might not be true.