The Wonder Engine

by T. Kingfisher

  That was a happy thought. I’m so glad I had it.

  The door opened again. The guards went out. Another man came in.

  Her torturer introduced himself politely.

  * * *

  Slate had absolutely no illusions about her ability to withstand torture. If anyone so much as pointed a sharp object at her, she’d sing like a robin in springtime.

  Sure, she might try to hold off spilling her guts—might even resist for a good thirty seconds—but there was just no way. Slate’s allergies were legendary. Foremost among them was an allergy to pain.

  Sorry, guys. Sorry, Caliban. We’re not all tragic heroes. Some of us are just tragic.

  The only problem was that she didn’t think she knew very much that Horsehead would care about. They had to know that the Dowager would be trying to stop the Clockwork Boys—as state secrets went, it wasn’t exactly a surprise. Slate didn’t know anything about troop movements or plans, and the big mystery of how the Clockwork Boys were made was unlikely to impress the boss, who presumably knew anyway.

  The only information she had that anyone would care about were the identities of her cohorts. That probably wouldn’t be enough to buy her a quick death. The boss was really sore over that bestiality warrant.

  He might not even ask me any questions. He might just move straight to the pointy bits.

  She hoped her friends had had the good sense to relocate as soon as she’d been caught.

  And if not, I suppose my guilt can keep me company while I’m hanging over the Grey Church in a crow’s cage.

  Heck, the man probably wouldn’t even believe anyone was stupid enough to try an assault on the werkblight factory with only four people and a pack of gnoles. Maybe if she was lucky, he’d kill her trying to extract information about the army that she really ought to have.

  Which spares me losing my eyes, anyway. For what that’s worth.

  Her only consolation was that she’d bitten her fingernails so short, they’d have a devil of a time pulling them out.

  As consolations went, she’d had better.

  Ironically, she actually knew where she was. It would have been nice if it was because of her highly trained senses, keeping track of the sounds of the carriage wheels on the cobbles and the echoes of the time-keeping statues, but it wasn’t. Horsehead’s repurposed lumberyard was simply one of the worst kept secrets of the Shadow Market. She’d even come here a time or two, under her own power, to deliver forged confessions for signing.

  Only once when the boss was…ah…playing…however. After that, she’d steered clear.

  If he wasn’t such a rat bastard, I wouldn’t have taken the gig. Still, somebody had to keep that poor girl out of his clutches.

  You do one good deed…

  And here she was, tied to a chair, with a very unpleasant man getting ready to soften her up.

  The torturer waved a device under her nose. It was silver and had pointy pinchy bits, several serrated holes, and a spring. Slate hadn’t the faintest idea what it might do and was afraid to find out.

  “Are you going to talk?” he asked.

  “Almost certainly,” Slate said, eyeing the device. It was the sort of object confined in kitchen drawers and liberated once a year to make chutney. She could easily imagine it doing vague but unfortunate things to various orifices, or appendages, or both simultaneously.

  “Now,” said the torturer calmly. “I am going to hurt you. Then I’m going to ask you a question. If you don’t answer it, I’m going to hurt you again.”

  “You know, I’m pretty sure I’m going to tell you everything I know, so we could just skip to that part and avoid the hurting altogether.”

  He cracked her upside the head with the silver thing. Slate yelped.

  Well, that was actually sort of anticlimactic, even if it did hurt.

  “Ow! Goddamnit, I said I was going to talk!”

  Her head hurt, and there was something tickling the back of her neck, which probably meant she was bleeding from the scalp. The pointy bits had been sharp. Someone was very serious about their chutney.

  “Does your mother know you do this for a living?”

  “You’re starting to annoy me, lady.”

  Slate did a brief mental calculation of whether annoying one’s torturer was a bad idea, or whether you were going to get tortured anyway and you might as well go out on a defiant note, and decided to err on the side of caution. “Sorry. I babble when I’m nervous. I’m very nervous right now. You probably guessed that. Hey, did I already mention that I’d tell you everything you want to know?”

  The torturer folded his arms and frowned down his nose at her. “Was someone in here before me to soften you up?”

  “No, I’m very soft to begin with.” She considered. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance I could seduce you out of this? I mean, not to be insulting, I’m sure you’re a man of principle, just figured I’d ask, in case you were a lonely man of principle—”

  “I’m married.”

  “I’m sure she’s lovely.” Slate sighed. She rolled her shoulders. Her elbows were getting stiff from being locked behind her, and the back of her neck had started to itch dreadfully, which was almost worse than the sting in her scalp.

  He smacked the silver widget into his palm. Horse chestnut peeler, maybe? Slate tried scrunching her head back and scratching with the back of her head, which didn’t help at all.

  “So are you going to ask me any questions, or are you just gonna smack me with your candied apricot shucker or whatever the heck that thing’s supposed to be?”

  “I’ll have you know, lady, this is a—”

  The true identity of the mystery widget remained a mystery, because the door opened again, and one of the flunkies came and murmured something to the torturer.

  “Hmmph. No cockroaches? And the eggs are rotten? Very well.” He turned back to Slate. “I shall return momentarily.”

  “Take your time.”

  He set the widget down on the table in front of her, where she couldn’t help but stare at it.

  “You might consider…thinking things over. Like your cooperation.”

  “I already offered to tell you anything I know!”

  The door slammed.

  Slate, who had a pretty good understanding of the criminal mind—you didn’t hang around Brenner for too long and not start to pick things up—was pretty sure that they were actually waiting on the boss to show up. This was his petty vengeance, after all, and he’d certainly want to watch. Otherwise, the efficient man with his edible cactus descaler would have reduced her to a weeping heap in short order.

  There was also almost certainly nothing planned involving either cockroaches or fresh eggs. They were under orders to wait, and were simply letting her stew in her own imagination while they did.

  “Joke’s on you, you bastards,” she muttered. “I’m an accountant. I don’t have an imagination.”

  Although I would have liked to know that that thing actually was. Not knowing is going to drive me nuts.

  So there she sat, tied to a chair in the middle of a mostly empty room, her wrists and ankles tightly bound, with blood leaking slowly down the back of her neck.

  It was, Slate reflected, the first thing that had gone right all goddamn day.

  Thirty-Four

  The warehouse stood in an abandoned lumber yard. There were stacks of wood everywhere, to provide a desultory amount of cover for the other activities in the building. If one looked closely, one might discover that most of the lumber had warped, splintered, or quietly disintegrated into piles of dry rot, but by the time one got that far, guards were already looking closely back.

  “Three guards,” said Grimehug. “Three that a gnole can smell.”

  “Is there a back entrance?” asked Brenner.

  “Probably,” said Caliban, unsheathing his sword and walking into the open.

  “Aaaaand you’re an idiot,” said Brenner.

  Caliban broke into a run.
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br />   “He’s an idiot,” said Brenner to Learned Edmund, sighting down his crossbow.

  “He seems to be very concerned,” said the dedicate, pushing his glasses higher up on his nose. “I hope that he does not do anything terribly fool—”

  Click.

  Thrum.

  The archer on the roof fell over the side of the building to the ground. Brenner began cranking the bow back to reload it.

  “See why Crazy Slate likes you, dark man,” said Grimehug. He gave Brenner a thoughtful look. “See why she’s scared of you, too.” Brenner grinned like a shark.

  The first guard, who had been looking at Caliban in disbelief, turned and looked at the dead body, apparently quite surprised. He turned back, apparently realizing that a lunatic with a sword was really honest-to-god charging him on a quiet night in the middle of the warehouse district.

  To his credit, he did try to block. It went badly. Caliban swung his sword and something awful happened in the vicinity of the guard’s head.

  Learned Edmund let out a squeak and put his hand in his mouth.

  Another crossbow bolt came out of the darkness, missed Caliban by a quarter of an inch, and slammed into the ground.

  Caliban flattened himself against the side of the building. Brenner finished cranking his own weapon back and shot that archer, with substantially better aim. The body fell backwards onto the roof.

  And then everything was quiet.

  “You should be dead,” hissed Brenner. “You should be so dead! You don’t just charge people like that! My god! How are you not dead?”

  “They’re used to gang warfare,” said Caliban calmly. “And the watch, and I assume they’ve bought them off. They don’t expect Knight-Champions to charge them waving a sword.”

  He cleaned his sword off on the dead man’s tunic. “They aren’t armored for it,” he added. “You really need a shield against people like me. Or a pike. Pikes are better. The farther away you keep me, the better.”

  “You’re insane,” said Brenner. “Just—just—gahh!” He waved his arms in the air a few times, shaking his head. “There were archers!”

  “Yes, and you shot them.”

  “They could have shot you first!”

  “I had faith in you.”

  “Gaaaaah!”

  “Also I went along the side of the building. It made me significantly more difficult to hit. They had to come up to the edge to shoot down, and I assumed that would give you a clearer shot.”

  Brenner folded his arms and looked sullenly furious.

  “Would you like to open the door?” asked Caliban.

  “What, you’re not going to just bash it down?”

  “I could if you like, but I thought you’d like to feel useful.”

  Brenner said something under his breath. Caliban thought it was probably just as well he didn’t catch it.

  Two minutes later, they were inside Boss Horsehead’s private playground.

  * * *

  By dint of half an hour of intense wiggling, Slate had gotten a foot loose.

  It was the shoes, the wonderful, amazing, badly fitting Chadori shoes. The ropes had been tight, but the shoes had not, the socks padding them had been pushed down with a lot of toe flexing, and Slate had thrashed and kicked and chewed on her lower lip and felt blisters break and yelped and swore and finally gotten her foot out.

  Bless you, gods of footwear. I will make sacrifices at your temple if I live through this. Bless you, Chadori cobblers. You are saints among men.

  The second one was a lot easier, because she could help it along with the other foot.

  Once she had both feet loose, she scooted her hips as far forward in the chair as her shoulder joints would allow, reached out with her toes, and started trying to grab the widget.

  * * *

  There were several more guards. They all looked extremely surprised. None of them were heavily armed, particularly around the head and neck, which meant that none of them survived more than a few seconds under Brenner’s daggers.

  “Do you ever miss?” asked Caliban.

  “All the time. I missed that last guy.”

  “You put a dagger in his eye.”

  “Yes, but I was aiming for the other eye.”

  All the guards were strung out throughout the outer hallways, in the way of men who expect theft much more than they expect, for example, two extremely angry men with bladed weapons to come charging through, killing anyone they run across.

  Learned Edmund threw up.

  They waited for a moment while the dedicate retched. Grimehug held him upright, looking bemused, or at least something that Caliban thought was bemusement. It was hard to tell with Grimehug.

  “Please don’t kill this next one,” said Caliban, as they rounded a corner.

  “What? Really?”

  The next one was a short, rat-faced fellow with a drawn dagger. He let out a shout, which would probably alert someone, and started to run away.

  “Back of the knee, Brenner.”

  “You just don’t appreciate the work that goes into this,” said Brenner angrily. “Daggers in knees? Seriously? It’s very difficult when they move like that!”

  Thrum.

  The crossbow bolt took the running man in the calf and dropped him to the ground.

  “Which is why I use the crossbow for that,” the assassin continued.

  The rat-faced man dropped to the ground, screaming and clutching his leg.

  Caliban picked him up, slammed him against a wall, and said “Is Boss Horsehead here?”

  “No!” shrieked the man. “No, no, my leg! My leg! I’m going to die!”

  “Horsehead,” said Caliban, bouncing the back of his head off the wall again.

  “Ngghh! No! He was supposed to come later—he hasn’t yet—my leg! My fucking leg!”

  “And where does he keep his prisoners?”

  “Pris…wha…my leg…”

  He fainted. Caliban dropped him.

  “You gonna kill that?”

  “No,” said Caliban. “He’s a paid thug and he’s not in my way any more.” He began to lope down the corridor, sword out.

  “Paladins,” muttered Brenner bitterly, and followed.

  * * *

  Slate was having a long day.

  She’d gotten the widget in her toes, she’d flipped it into her lap and between her thighs, she had wiggled it, with some awkward posterior action and a lot of widget holes, around to the back and had managed to get one of the pointy bits wedged against her bound wrists.

  After that, it was just a lot of painful sawing.

  There was another painful jab in her wrist. She winced.

  Her great fear was that she’d push too vigorously or at the wrong angle and shove the widget onto the floor. Then she’d be sunk. There was no way to manage without the widget, even with her feet free. If she tried to flip over the back of the chair, she’d rip both arms out of the socket.

  Her wrists must look like chutney. The blood was making them slippery, which was a mixed blessing.

  At least they were giving her plenty of time. No one had even looked in on her. That was actually kind of odd.

  Slate sawed harder.

  Thirty-Five

  “I suppose you want me to not kill the next one, too,” said Brenner nastily.

  “That would be most helpful, yes.”

  “I was being sarcastic.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  The assassin let out a growl of frustration.

  Caliban was wondering if there would even be another guard. The center of the building was almost empty. They’d opened a few unlocked doors and found a broom closet, a privy, and two completely empty rooms that probably hadn’t been used since the place had been a lumberyard.

  It was a trifle awkward, when you were carrying an enormous sword and out for blood, to discover that you’d raided a building which didn’t have that many people in it.

  “I don’t think they were expecting us,” he said
.

  Brenner did not dignify this with a response.

  “Or else there’s just…no one here…”

  The assassin sighed. “Why would there be anyone? We’re raiding a building with a couple of outer guards. They’ve got no reason to expect anyone to be coming here. You said it yourself, they expect gang warfare and the watch, not people charging them with swords.”

  “I assumed once we got inside, Boss Horsehead would have more guards.”

  “I don’t think he’s even here yet,” said Brenner. “He travels with an entourage, but why bother paying for a bunch of men to stand around when he’s not here?”

  “What about Slate? Shouldn’t someone be guarding her?”

  “Meaning absolutely no disrespect for our Slate, but I don’t think you need a dozen men for that.”

  Caliban frowned. “So that’s everybody, then?”

  “Not by a long shot,” said Brenner. “Horsehead’s probably having a nice dinner, maybe some wine, to warm up for torturing an old enemy. Once he shows up and sees what we did to his front door…well, I’d as soon not be around for that.”

  “I was hoping to kill him.”

  “Go ahead. Slate and I will watch. From a very long way away. Possibly the next district.”

  “Assuming we can find—hey! You there!”

  A man was walking down the hall, wearing a vague, distracted expression and tightening a pair of rawhide gloves. He looked up, puzzled.

  “What are you doing h—”

  Brenner threw a knife. It hit the man in the sternum and quivered upright.

  The man stared at the knife. He seemed very concerned about it, as anyone would be. It had not penetrated particularly deeply, but having a knife sprout from one’s chest tends to narrow one’s focus.

  “Brenner!”

  “What? I didn’t kill him.”

  “You could have!”

  “Pfff, not with all those ribs. Throwing knives at people’s ribs is stupid. That’s why I like eyes. Even if you miss, there’s still a knife in their face and it scares the crap out’ve them.”