by Kaja Foglio
This was evidently the wrong thing to say. “In charge?” The man snarled, and pulled a sharp-looking punch knife from somewhere in his clothes. “Right now that would be me, you cow! You see anybody else in this room?” He stepped forward. “Now, if you’re lucky, I’ll be the Guy Who Lets You Live.”
Agatha frowned and rammed the heavy hand truck into the young man’s shins. He screamed and fell to his knees. “You filthy harpy,” he howled. “I’m going to—”
Agatha rammed him again, smashing him to the ground. “My leg!” he squealed. “You broke my damn leg!”
“I doubt it,” Agatha said coldly. “I got decent grades in my anatomy classes. You’ll probably just have a nasty bruise for awhile.”
For a heartbeat, she was at a loss as to what to do next. Then she remembered her time onstage. How would the villainous Lucrezia Mongfish handle this?
She kicked the punch-knife away and placed her boot solidly on the side of his neck. “Now this…” She leaned forward a little, putting her weight into it. The man froze. “This could seriously mess you up. But it’s the least of what I’ll do to you if you screw with me again. Do you understand?”
“I—I—”
Impatiently, Agatha leaned in again, harder. “Yes!” he shrieked. “I understand!”
Agatha removed her boot and the man scrabbled away on his hands and knees, not even taking the time to climb to his feet before he was out of sight.
That was disturbingly satisfying, Agatha realized. This troubling train of thought was derailed by the sound of slow clapping from behind her. She was so caught up in the whole ‘performance’ mindset, that she almost took a bow before she caught herself.
“Nice!” The voice belonged to a diminutive girl clad in an orange coverall. She had a shaggy mop of pink-tinted hair, a set of mischievous eyes, and a huge grin, with a distinct gap between her front teeth.
She straightened up from the wall she had been leaning against and sauntered over. On her way, she stooped to pick up the punch-knife. She examined it and gave a dismissive snort. Agatha flinched as she tossed it onto the hand truck. “That’s yours now, if you want it. Right of conquest.” She stopped about two meters away from Agatha and examined her with open curiosity. “I’m Sanaa Wilhelm. Nice to meet you.” She stuck out her hand. Agatha made a snap judgment and shook it. Sanaa nodded.
“Well, now that you’ve wiped your feet on the doormat,” she hooked a thumb in the direction of the vanished man, “Welcome to Hell. You are—?”
Agatha realized that she hadn’t even considered a false name. “I’m…Pix.”
If Sanaa noticed the slight hesitation, she chose to ignore it. Agatha continued, “Do I have to fight you now?”
Sanaa laughed. “Nah, that’s a boy game. In here, we girls stick together. ‘Play fair, do your share, and we’re there.’” Then her face got serious. “If you don’t, you’ll be dead soon enough. It’s real easy to wind up dead in here. People do it all the time. You got any problem with that?”
Agatha shook her head. “It’s a better deal than I got out there.”
Again, Sanaa flashed a grin and patted Agatha on the shoulder. “Ha! Knew you was smart! Knew it when I saw you! Now, you’re new, so you got kitchen duty.” She sighed in resignation. “I don’t suppose you can cook?”
Agatha nodded with confidence. Old Taki, the circus cook, had cheerfully shared several of his “secrets”—tips on feeding large groups of hungry people, many of whom had knives. “I can cook. It’s just chemistry.”
Wilhelm brightened. “Really? Oh gosh, we need a good cook! The guy doing it now’s a mechanic, and he’s a complete idiot. I’d rather eat his engines!
“If you’re really good, you might not have to do any repair work at all! I mean, you’d be stuck in the kitchen all day…but still, it’s a pretty sweet deal.”
Agatha frowned. The last thing she wanted was to be confined to the kitchens. She wanted to be out and moving as quickly as possible.
Wilhelm continued. “So—what did you do to wind up in here, anyway?”
Agatha gave her a sardonic grin. “Poisoned thirty-seven people who complained about my cooking.”
Wilhelm just looked at her for a moment, then changed the subject—going into the details of the worker’s routines and the location of various facilities. “And we girls all bunk together. That way we can watch out for each other.”
Agatha nodded in approval as Sanaa continued. “So, we all eat twice a day, both at six—”
Agatha realized what was disturbing her. The complete blandness of what Sanaa was talking about. She interrupted. “This is all everyday stuff.”
Sanaa looked surprised. “Well…yeah. In here, the routine stuff is what keeps you going.”
Agatha waved a hand. “Okay, but didn’t a Heterodyne girl—?”
Sanaa’s face soured. “Oh. Her. Yeah, she’s here. She’s holed up with Professor Tiktoffen. You’ll meet him.” Her eyebrows went up. “Oh wait—I get it! You think she’ll fix the Castle and turn off all the deathtraps and la, la, la! We’ll all go home in time for supper!” She snorted. “Well, forget it. People’ve been working on this man-eating trash heap for years. And she thinks she’s gonna waltz in here, snap her fingers, and be the new queen? Shyeah.
“I been in here too long. There’s no easy way out. Just in.” Suddenly she whirled upon Agatha and leaned in. “But…and you gotta know this…I did see someone get out. Just once, but I saw it. She was smart. Collected her points, played the game, and walked out free. She did it. You can do it. Just like I’m gonna do it.” Her eyes darted up into the shadows and her shoulders hunched slightly. “Just as long as this place don’t get mad at me first.”
They walked quietly for a while, leaving the entry corridor and stepping into a larger passageway. Boxes and bales of supplies were stacked against the graffiti-covered walls. Agatha couldn’t help but read some of it as she passed by. Most of it railed against the Baron, the Castle, various magistrates, or just fate in general. There also seemed to be a great deal of wanton destruction. Entire walls looked like they had been smashed with hammers. Sanaa saw the direction of Agatha’s gaze.
“Most of the Castle is alive. You might’ve heard, but I’m telling you, you really don’t know what that means, yet. This area is one of the few that…isn’t. It’s just a building. So sometimes, when you want to smash the whole place down, this is one of the few places where it’s safe to just go nuts.”
She must have seen a touch of disapproval upon Agatha’s face. “You just wait until someone you like gets squished, or you’ve been grinding away on some pointless job for fourteen hours because if you stop, you’ll get squished. You wait until you been in here a couple of years and you wake up and realize that you’re probably going to die in here and that you’ll do anything to not get assigned to the Room of Rust and Hooks, or maybe you’re just shaken because the new kid you’ve been explaining things to trusted you and got killed doing what you told her to do. Something you’ve done yourself. Something you’ve done a hundred times before. And that’s if you’re lucky. You just wait and see. You’ll be taking a hammer to that wall before the month is out.”
Agatha said nothing, which was, apparently, the correct response, because when Sanaa next spoke, she seemed her previously cheerful self.
“We’re almost at the kitchen. That’s where they’ll take those shackles off.”
“So why don’t the Old Timers want this ‘cushy job’?”
Sanaa started with a touch of guilt. “I knew you was smart,” she muttered. “Okay, there’s a reason they make the newbies do it,” she admitted. “No one wants it. The kitchen’s a Live Room. Now, nobody’s ever been killed in there, which is, frankly, kind of weird. We think it gets more pleasure just messing with us, and whatever deal it made with the Baron—well, it knows we gotta eat. Anyway, it’s so annoying, it gets to the point where you’d rather face death somewhere quieter.”
Agatha considered this. �
��You’re putting me on.”
Sanaa gave her an honest grin. “Ha! Oh, don’t you worry, people will have you fetching devil dog chow and left-handed trilobite tighteners soon enough!” She paused. “Go along with the first one or two of those, by the way. You’ll fit in better. But if you get suckered more than four times, you’ll be everybody’s little minion.” She looked at Agatha. “You don’t look like the kind of person who wants that.”
Sanaa stopped outside a doorway. “Okay, here’s the kitchen, and here’s our lousy cook.” She raised her voice. “Hey! Moloch! Supplies are here.”
Agatha froze in horror at the name—and, indeed, it was her old acquaintance Moloch von Zinzer whose head popped around the corner.
It was Moloch who had first brought her to the attention of the Wulfenbachs. Indeed, it could be argued that he was the one person responsible for everything that had gone wrong for her lately.
When Agatha first stumbled across them, Moloch and his brother Omar had been a pair of itinerant soldiers—remnants of a small private army that had challenged Baron Wulfenbach and lost. It said a lot about Europa at this time that they were unremarkable for that.
They had wandered into the town of Beetleburg, where Agatha had been living for the past eleven years, and had robbed her. They stole the golden trilobite locket she had been told to never remove—the strange mechanical locket built by Barry Heterodyne to keep Agatha’s mind suppressed and far from the brilliance and madness that would identify her as a Spark.
The device in the locket—with its mind-deadening effects—had quickly killed Omar. Moloch, believing Agatha to be responsible, had sought her out to extract revenge. But Agatha’s Spark had already begun to manifest and—in the subsequent confusion that nearly always follows a Spark’s breakthrough—both she and Moloch had been captured by Baron Wulfenbach. Eventually, she had managed to escape. Apparently, he had not.33
He had no love for Agatha, and, indeed, would probably relish exposing her, leaving her trapped in the castle, short-shackled to a hand truck. This would reduce her chances of success to almost nothing.
Desperately she tried to think of a way out. Moloch saw the two women and his eyes widened. His jaw dropped and the mug he held in his hand slipped, spilling hot liquid down his shirt. “Sanaa!” he breathed.
He suddenly gave a yip of pain as the liquid began to soak through his shirt. He looked down. “Oh, no! Let me get a towel!” He turned to go and smacked into the doorjamb. Dazed, he turned to them, a crazed smile upon his face. “I’m…I’m okay! I’ll just use my apron! That’s what it’s for! Yeah!”
He raised the apron in his hands and brought it to his face. Unfortunately, he had neglected to put down the mug, so the rest of the scalding liquid was sloshed over his face. He screamed from behind the apron and flung the mug away.
It hit an obviously handmade shelf loaded with dishes and bounced back onto his head. Moloch snagged it out of the air. He turned to the two appalled women with a triumphant grin upon his face. “Ha! See? It didn’t even break!” Then the shelf fell over onto him, burying him in a heap of shattered crockery.
Agatha and Sanaa stared at the still form for a moment, then Agatha leaned in. “Do you think he’s—”
Sanaa rolled her eyes. ”Smitten with me? Yes, I know. It’s amazing we get anything to eat at all, really.” She sighed. “He’ll be fine when I’m gone, or so I’m told.”
She stepped over to Moloch, grabbed a handful of his hair, and hauled his head up. “I don’t have time for this. I have to get back to work.” Moloch stared at her blankly. Sanaa spoke loudly. “Pay attention, fool.” She pointed at Agatha. “New. Girl.” She gave his head a shake. “Unlock her!”
Moloch blinked. “What?”
Sanaa rolled her eyes. “New girl! Shackles! Get key!” Moloch continued to stare at her wide-eyed.
Sanaa gave a small scream of frustration. “Don’t keep me standing around here or I’ll smack you—”
That did it. “Yes!” Moloch began thrashing about on the ground like a fish. His hand dived into various pockets. “Yes! Key! Right!” he babbled.
He produced a shiny key. “Ha! Here! See?”
Sanaa plucked it from his hand and turned her back on him to open Agatha’s cuffs with a quick twist and snap. “Well, thank goodness for that,” she muttered.
She wheeled back and caught Moloch rising onto one knee. She grabbed his face and squeezed his bearded cheeks until his eyes bulged. “Now pay attention. Here is key!” She waited until Moloch took it and repocketed it. “Good! Now I will tell the Professor she’s here. She says she can actually cook, so show her where everything is, then let her get started. Got it?”
Moloch nodded as much as he could. Sanaa let him go and straightened with a sigh. “That should do it.” She turned back to Agatha. “See you later, Pix, I got work to do.”
“Thanks, Sanaa.”
The girl waved as she turned to go. “No problem. Just fix us something edible for a change.” She paused and than turned to Moloch. “And you taste everything she cooks, okay?”
She gave Agatha an apologetic shrug and trotted off.
The two stared after her for a moment until she turned a corner and was gone. Moloch sighed. “Isn’t she wonderful?”
Agatha looked at him sideways. “Yes,” she admitted. “I like her already.” Tentatively, she put a hand on Moloch’s arm. “I…I don’t know your reasons, but I really appreciate your not telling her who I am.”
Moloch blinked and looked at her in surprise. Then he actually registered who she was.
Then he screamed.
The so-called “Sneaky Gate” was a narrow tunnel through the city walls. It went on for several meters in solid blackness after the door they had come through slammed shut behind them. Finally, Oggie, with Gil over one shoulder, pushed a half-sized door open and led Dimo and Maxim into a tight alley. Maxim looked around and smiled. “Hokay! Ve iz close by dis time!” He began to lead the way out of the alley, and nearly plowed straight into Captain Vole. The Jägers stared at each other in surprise. Maxim reacted first, his face breaking into a huge grin. “Vole! Hyu olt veasle-eater! Hyu iz schtill here!” His eyes glanced upwards. “Und dot iz a mighty fine hat!”
For just a second, a smirk rippled across Vole’s face—then he erased it with a snarl. He turned away and saw Gilgamesh.
“Master Wulfenbach! Hyu iz injured!”
Gil struggled to get to his feet. “Yes…a bit…”
Vole sniffed. “Hy ken schmell de blood and it iz hobvious dot hyu iz about to collapse.” He snagged the young man’s hand. “Hy vill get hyu to de hospital.”
“No! Wait!” Gil tried to resist, but found himself pulled effortlessly along. “You’re correct! I do need to rest, but if word gets out that I’m injured, everything I just did out there will be pointless. If there is another attack before I can make repairs to the lightning rod—”
This stopped Vole dead. He turned around. “Hyu lightning schtick is broke?” He considered this and a slow grin spread across his face. “Den anodder attack vould be a goot ting.”
Gil shook his head. “No, you misunderstand, my machines are broken—”
“Hy onderschtand perfectly. De two Heterodyne gurls iz both beeg trouble for hyu poppa. Hiff dere iz anodder attack, den de castle ken be destroyed, both gurls killed. Hit vill be verra sad—” He chuckled. “Ve vill get hyu poppa beck into hiz big airship, and from dere ve ken deal vit de…repercussions. Yez, hit vill all vork owt just fine.”
A hiss diverted his attention from his musings. Jenka was practically vibrating with rage and the other Jägers were glaring at him with an ice-cold fury.
“So it iz true.” Dimo said. “Hyu are no longer a Jäger.”
Jenka pointed at Gil. “Ve iz gunna tek dis guy someplace safe und help protect der town and der Kessle and der family, as ve swore to do. Stend aside.”
Vole sneered, releasing Gil and standing tall. “Devoted slaves to de last. Hyu dun o
ndershtand. Efferyting has chenged! De family iz dead and hy intendz to keep it dot vay.” He glared down at them. “Vich of hyu iz gunna shtop me?”
“Oh, that would be me.” The voice from behind caused Vole to spin in such a way that Gil’s flying kick met his jaw perfectly, sending him slamming into the wall. He crumpled to the ground and stared up at the younger Wulfenbach in surprise.
“What do I have to do?” Gil asked the air around him. “I just took down an entire army of war clanks and I’m still being treated like a halfwit child!” He pointed at Vole. “Now you listen very carefully. The Heterodyne girl is not to be harmed. I won’t allow it!”
Vole cocked an eyebrow, and then launched himself, snarling. “Hyu jabberink veaklink!” He swiped at Gil with a clawed hand that, if it had connected, would have knocked him back several meters. He seemed surprised when the younger man merely pirouetted like a dancer and sighed.
Vole screamed, “Hy vill keel hyu! Vill be onfortunate accident! Hyu poppa vill stitch hyu back togedder vitout de schtupid bits!” Then he lunged.
Again Vole missed, but this time, as he sailed past, Gil grabbed the back of Vole’s head and added his own strength, sending the Jäger face-first into the wall. “I keep trying to be reasonable.” Gil muttered. “To be fair.” He deflected another attack. “I try to talk to people.”
Vole made another charge, which Gil stepped quickly into. He gripped Vole’s tunic and tossed him over his shoulder. Vole crashed to the ground on his back—hard. “And no one ever takes it as anything other than weakness!” Gil finished.
Vole raised his head and shook it. Gil looked down at him. “You listen to me trying to be civilized, and you all think, ‘Oh, he’s nothing. Him, we can ignore. Him, we can push around. We can do whatever we want—he won’t be able to stop us.’”
He turned away. Vole flexed his back, sprung to his feet with a single movement and, screaming, launched himself at Gil from behind.
With perfect timing, Gil bent and gently placed his stick on the ground. Vole sailed past overhead.
Gil stood up. “No one ever takes me seriously unless I shout and threaten like a cut-rate stage villain.” He sighed again.