Vasyl dashed up to the door before he could lose his nerve and flung the bar up. The door leaped open. Panting, Vasyl hurried through the dark opening. At the last second, Broom scurried in behind him—Vasyl had once again forgotten to order him not to follow. The door slammed shut. Vasyl stood in darkness, the only sound his heart pounding in his ears.
“Broom,” he whispered hoarsely, “light.”
Painful light exploded all around Vasyl. He threw up a hand to shield his eyes. When he could see, he found himself in a kitchen much larger than the cottage walls could encompass. Vasyl spun, trying to take it all in. Dirty flagstone floor. Ashy ceramic stove. Greasy black kettle. Grimy kitchen table. Cobwebbed cupboards. Tangled loom. Rumpled bed. The light seemed to come from the walls themselves, though Broom gamely cast his tiny twin beams.
In the corner, tall and thin, arms folded, stood the old hag with her tangle of gray hair. She looked like a mop left to dry. Then she grinned, revealing iron teeth that made Vasyl’s stomach shrivel back against his spine.
“Well,” she said in a gravelly voice lower than Petro’s, “it isn’t often dinner just walks through my front door.”
Vasyl gave the door behind him an involuntary glance. Three heavy bolts slid home with a clunk, a thud, and a boom. Broom squeaked. Vasyl swallowed and wondered if his life could be counted in seconds. He forced himself to stand straight.
“You don’t want to eat me,” he said.
“No?” She licked her lips with a pale tongue and Vasyl realized she was at least two heads taller than he. “Why?”
Vasyl ticked off reasons with trembling fingers. “I’ll taste stringy and gamy. You just ate from all those plates outside, so you’re not hungry. And I brought other food for you.” From the sack he produced the bread and vodka, which he put on the awful kitchen table. Then he backed away. Broom stayed right behind him.
“Hm. I can give you a few minutes.” She gobbled the bread in two bites, poured the vodka down her throat, and flung the bottle into the fireplace with a crash. Vasyl flinched. “So, boy, what gives you the balls to brave the dancing hut of Baba Yaga?”
Coming from her, the word boy didn’t sound insulting. “I need your help, Grandmother.”
“They all do. And they all end up in that kettle. Why should you be any different?”
“You’re talking to me instead of eating me,” Vasyl pointed out, not quite believing he was doing this. “That makes me at least a little different.”
“Hm. Usually I get tender young girls. They ask me to give them a dowry for some hideous husband or hand them fire for their stupid stepmothers when they could just as easily get either for themselves if they would just try.”
“It must be difficult,” Vasyl said, “to watch foolish people make foolish mistakes, especially when you give them good advice.”
“You can’t possibly know how difficult.” A rusty mechanical cat crawled out from under a cupboard, and Baba Yaga picked it up. Her claws scraped absently across its back and made Vasyl’s teeth ache. “I tell them their husbands and stepmothers have to sleep sometime, and the kitchen is filled with long, sharp knives. Or, if you must bow to them, make fire yourself with a pair of sticks when the hearth goes cold. But no—they always come to me. And then they cry bitter tears when I drop them into the kettle or, if I’m in a very good mood”—her claws raked the cat’s back with a screech that raised Vasyl’s hair—“I chase them across a river or through a hedge to teach them a lesson in self-sufficiency.”
“But they don’t learn much, do they?” Vasyl said.
“Never,” she sighed. “They always marry some stupid twit and spread lies about my—hey, now!”
Vasyl tensed. “Yes?”
Baba Yaga laughed, a low, throaty sound that sent confusing shivers down Vasyl’s back. She tossed the cat on the table, filled a long, thin pipe, and lit it with a spark created by snapping one claw across her teeth. The smoke smelled of diesel.
“So you bring the gift of listening as well as food, do you?” she said. “You’re smarter than I gave you credit for, boy. I like that. I think I like you.”
Vasyl let himself feel a tiny bit of relief. “So you’ll help me?”
“Like can mean any number of things,” Baba Yaga said around the pipe, “including how good you taste. But for now, it means yes, I might help you. What do you want?”
Vasyl took a deep breath. The mayor in his arrogant red velvet seemed simple and friendly compared to Baba Yaga’s grimy kitchen and iron stare. “I need a mechanical that can think for itself.”
Baba Yaga sucked silently at her pipe for a long moment. The cat stared at Broom. Broom stared at the cat.
“What for?” she asked at last.
“So I can keep my hands and my head.” Vasyl tried not to shift from foot to foot. A tightrope stretched behind and before him, and he didn’t dare move.
Baba Yaga stared at him for another iron moment. The smelly blue smoke filled the room. Vasyl remained silent.
“What,” Baba Yaga said at last, “does this have to do with the tasty young Tatar waiting outside my gate?”
Vasyl’s knuckles went white. “Leave him out of this. He hasn’t entered your yard. He hasn’t broken any of your rules. You can’t touch him.”
Baba Yaga ticked off fingers of her own. “He’s out and about on the thirteenth night of October. He used my password without my permission. And you brought his delicious scent into my cottage. I can do as I please, boy. Answer the question.”
“This has nothing to do with Petro.” Fear widened Vasyl’s eyes and made him pant. “Leave him alone.”
“Hm.” She leaned toward Vasyl, invading Vasyl’s space with her long nose, smoky pipe, and greasy hair. Still panting, Vasyl held his ground and smelled sweat and oil and hot metal.
“He’s still mine if I want him,” she whispered into his ear, exhaling warm smoke like a dragon. “Would you offer to take his place, Fair Vasyl?”
Her words turned his skin to ice. “I…I…”
“Never mind.” She leaned back and waved a hand, creating blue swirls in the smoky air. “I was only playing with you, like Maroushka here plays with mice. She can’t eat them, but it makes for interesting results when she tries. Sit down, boy. You make me tired to look at you.”
The room spun more than a little, and Vasyl gratefully sank onto one of the creaky benches near the table. Broom scuttled closer, his eyes still alight.
“What of that one?” Baba Yaga was still standing. Looming. “Can’t your mechanical think for itself?”
“Broom? No,” Vasyl said. He started to put his elbow on the table, but his skin shied away from the filth, and he set his arm in his lap instead. “I’ve improved Broom, but he can’t think.”
“He?” Baba Yaga asked mildly.
Something in her tone tightened Vasyl’s stomach again. “I’ve had him for so long, it seems rude to say it. You called your cat a she.”
“Indeed.” Baba Yaga knocked the ashes out of her pipe into the fireplace, and a cloud of angry red sparks puffed up. “Where did you get him?”
“My mother gave him to me. She was a crafter, not a tinker, so she could make instead of just repair. But she died when I was very young.”
“Your father remarry?”
Vasyl lifted his chin. “Yes.”
“Bitchy stepmother?”
“You’d get along with her,” Vasyl said before he could stop himself, then braced himself for a blow or worse.
But Baba Yaga only snorted. “Why didn’t your father throw her out?”
“He wasn’t strong enough. When I was old enough, he told me to flee. I obeyed, and took Broom with me. That was more than twenty years ago, which means my father’s probably dead by now. The bitch-mother, too, for that matter. And I don’t care if she is.” He suddenly felt defensive. “What of it?”
“Not my job to judge, boy.” Baba Yaga filled and lit the pipe again. “But I do observe that it’s difficult to escape familiar
patterns. When you live your life with cruel words, you look for people to give them to you. When you escape an evil stepmother, you take an uncaring bride. When your father throws you out, you love someone who won’t love you back. And to keep yourself in cruelty, you’re willing to risk head and hands on the mayor’s sideboard. Keep the pattern going. Hm.”
Vasyl’s mouth had dried up, and he realized he was clutching Broom with one hand. “That’s not the way it is.”
“Pah.” Smoke curled into the heavy air from between Baba Yaga’s iron teeth. “This gets us nowhere. I said I would help you, and I will.”
“So it’s possible to make a mechanical think for itself?”
“It’s possible. But first we’ll talk payment.”
The hope that had arisen in Vasyl’s chest froze like an apple blossom in a spring frost. “Payment?”
“Why does everyone think I work for free?” Baba Yaga asked Maroushka, who lounged at her own end of the table.
“I don’t have any—”
Suddenly Baba Yaga was looming over Vasyl again, bending down so her long, thin nose practically touched his. The terror that tore through Vasyl turned his bones to lava and his heart to ice. Her thin figure filled his entire world with famine, disease, and loss. The point of one clawed fingertip lifted his chin and forced him to look into her eyes. They were as black and empty as an eclipse, and Vasyl felt they might drain the life from him.
“Do I look like I want money?” she hissed. “Your paltry mayor wants head and hands. Me, I’ll take much, much more.”
Vasyl’s stepmother was standing over him again with her stick, the one twice as thick as her thumb, and he knew when Father came home and saw the cuts and bruises, she would simply say the boys up the street were at little Vaska again, making fun and starting fights because of all the time the boy wasted reading his mother’s books and tinkering with his mother’s machines, and Father would sigh and tell Vaska that he should spend more time outside in what passed for fresh air in Kiev, and since no one listened to Vaska, he learned to listen to other people, read their bodies, and take their secrets so he could use them for protection instead of fighting back directly, and Baba Yaga had seen the truth of it and now he would pay for letting the secret out.
No. He touched Broom’s solid shell for reassurance, and it was as if his mother were there again, in some small way. The fear receded. That was the past and this is the present. If she were going to kill me, she would have done it by now.
“What’s your price, then?” he asked. “My soul? I’ll give you that, if you want.”
Baba Yaga backed away a little, then chortled. “Nice try, boy. We both know your soul belongs to someone else and isn’t yours to bargain with.”
Vasyl spread his hands. “Then what?”
“My biggest fear, boy, is that while I’m putting together your precious mechanical, my poor cottage will fall to ruin.”
Vasyl looked around the filthy kitchen. “Er…I don’t understand what you’re asking.”
“Keep house for me while I work,” Baba Yaga clarified. “Today you will clean this room. And if you don’t meet my standards, it’ll be more than your head on my table.”
Vasyl remembered the bone fence outside and swallowed. “All right. I only have three days before—”
Baba Yaga waved this away. “Do you know what a tesseract is, boy?”
“No.”
“Suffice it to say that we will have sufficient time inside this cottage. Let’s both begin.” She stalked out of the room through a door Vasyl hadn’t noticed before and slammed it shut.
Vasyl looked around the harshly lit, windowless kitchen and its coating of grime. He sighed heavily from his chair, shrugged out of his tinker’s pack, and opened it.
“You know you’re screwed, right?” said Maroushka the cat.
Vasyl’s hands jerked, and the pack rattled. “What—?”
“Screwed,” Maroushka repeated from the table. “It means treated unfairly or harshly.”
Vasyl scrambled to regain his equilibrium. Mechanicals didn’t talk. Ever. Therefore the cat wasn’t a mechanical, or Baba Yaga could work real miracles.
“I—I know what I’m doing,” Vasyl replied shortly.
“I—I know what I’m doing,” Maroushka repeated in an exact replica of Vasyl’s voice, and Vasyl jumped again. “They all say that.”
“I have help. I wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t.”
“Sure.” Maroushka yawned, exposing brass fangs and a rubbery tongue. “All the girls have help, right up until the moment she’s adding their bones to the fence.”
“I’m not a girl. Or a boy. I’m a man.”
“To her, anyone under a thousand years old is a baby, and everyone tastes the same in a stewpot. Look, the stories only talk about the two or three who get away, never the eight or nine hundred who become goulash. So you’re dead.”
“Probably.” Vasyl had had enough shocks for the day and found himself growing tired of them. “I have work to do.”
Baba Yaga’s door shook with thuds and clanks, and once Vasyl thought he heard a muffled scream. He reopened his pack.
“She’ll be back faster than you think,” Maroushka said, “and this place had better be cleaner than a virgin’s bathtub.”
“Do you think for yourself?” Vasyl extracted a can with a spout on it from the pack.
Maroushka stared at him with hard green eyes. “That’s a rude question.”
“But do you?”
“Yeah.” Maroushka sniffed. “Not that the answer means anything.”
“Because you could be programmed to say that,” Vasyl finished.
Maroushka licked one paw. “How do we know that anyone really thinks? For all you know, all the people in the world are mechanicals masquerading as people and you’re the only real human in it.”
“That would awfully self-centered.” Vasyl unscrewed the lid on the spout and pulled out his pocketknife. “Why should the entire universe revolve around me?”
“You’re here, aren’t you? In the cottage of the world’s most powerful crafter and witch in a cottage that exists partly outside time. That’s major shit. Of course you’re the center.”
“Everything is the center in an infinite universe,” Vasyl countered, “so technically you’re right.”
“Do you think for yourself?”
“Of course I do. I’m a human being.”
“Doesn’t mean you automatically get free thought.”
“Yes, it does.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Yes, it—oh, shut up!”
“My point.” Maroushka curled her tail about her paws with a clink, a faint echo to the loud rattles and clunks beyond Baba Yaga’s door. “Since you can’t think for yourself, what the hell are you doing?”
“I can, too, think for—oh, never mind.” Vasyl popped the cap off the spout, took a deep breath, and slashed his palm with the knife. He bit his lip against white-hot pain.
“Whether you agree with me or not, my question stands. Answer it.”
“I’m feeding Broom.” Vasyl unscrewed another cap on Broom’s side, let his blood flow into Broom’s fuel tank, and followed it with some of the can’s contents. Broom squeaked and bounced up and down as the liquid gurgled into him.
Maroushka sniffed the air. “Is that…paraffin oil?”
“My mother’s private formula.” Vasyl waggled the can. “Want some?”
The cat barely hesitated. “Damn straight!”
Vasyl found a similar cap between Maroushka’s shoulder blades. It was stiff with rust and came free with effort. Vasyl dripped blood and a measure of paraffin oil into the reservoir. Maroushka produced happy mechanical mewling noises. Broom, meanwhile, quivered with energy.
“I feel fifty years younger,” Maroushka said. “You can stay.”
“Unless your mistress eats me.” Vasyl gave the cat a speculative look and wrapped a rag around his wound. “You know, maybe I should just t
ake you to the mayor.”
Maroushka froze and tipped over with a crash. Startled, Vasyl poked at her, but she remained motionless. After a moment, she came back to life and sat up. “No one knows that I’m self-aware, kid. Not even her. And I intend to keep it that way.”
“She didn’t make you to think for yourself?”
“She barely feeds me from the dregs of her fuel bucket. You think she cares enough to make me think? Screw that. I had to figure it out for myself.”
“So, why are you telling me you can do it?”
“Kid, you feed me paraffin oil, and I’ll lick your earwax clean,” Maroushka said, then added, “You’d better get to work. You’ll find cleaning supplies in that cupboard.”
Vasyl shot Baba Yaga’s door an uneasy look, then turned to Broom, who seemed ready to burst. “Broom, clean this room.”
Broom saluted and shot about the room with inhuman speed. He yanked soap, brushes, rags, and buckets from the cupboard Maroushka had indicated and flew into work, washing, scrubbing, scraping, and scouring. Water sloshed everywhere, and the soft scent of soap overcame Baba Yaga’s pipe.
“How—?” Maroushka began.
“Mother’s private formula.” Vasyl snatched her away to avoid Brooms brushes, then set her down again. “You did say you felt younger.”
Just as Broom was throwing the rags back into the cupboard, Baba Yaga’s door slammed open.
“Broom,” Vasyl hissed, “stop!”
Broom obeyed as the witch stomped into the room. Her dress was stained with grease and she smelled of machine oil, reminding Vasyl unsettlingly of his mother. She put her hands on nonexistent hips and glared about the kitchen. Broom skittered to hide behind Vasyl, who drew himself upright despite his pounding heart. The black kettle that now gleamed on the stove yawned big enough to swallow him whole.
“How did you do it all, boy?” Baba Yaga demanded.
“I’m efficient.”
“Hm,” the witch grunted. “Well, I suppose it’ll do.”
Vasyl released the breath he’d been holding. “Thank you, Grandmother. About the mechanical, then.”
“Takes time, boy. We’ll talk tomorrow.” With that, she flung herself into the bed in the corner and fell to snoring loud enough to vibrate the floor. Vasyl stretched out on one of the hard benches that ran the length of the kitchen table. Exhaustion turned his bones to granite, but he couldn’t sleep.
Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables Page 4