Steven Harper - The Havoc Machine

Sofiya shrugged. “Come dance with him, then. I am sure he will understand. In any case, Mr. Sharpe, you may be sure that he is watching, and he is expecting you. If you do not come now, he will send for you later and you will come anyway.”

“Does he employ big men who break thumbs?” Thad touched the pistols at his side.

“No men. And he won’t hurt you, Mr. Sharpe.”

“Then why should I bother seeing him?”

Sofiya halted her horse in the middle of the road, much to the annoyance of the drover in the cart behind her. Thad halted as well. “How many people are in that circus of yours, Mr. Sharpe?”

“What? I don’t know. Sixty, maybe seventy.”

“Close friends?”

“Some closer than others.”

“He won’t hurt you, Mr. Sharpe,” Sofiya said, urging Kalvis forward. “Not if you come.”

“I see,” Thad said tightly.

“Applesauce,” Dante said as they rode into the city. The streets were already filled with morning traffic-horses with carts and women with baskets and men with bundles and children with books. Morning smells of bakery and manure and sewer slops and beer mingled together. Church bells pealed some distance away. Sofiya’s horse attracted glances, but not many-automatons were striking but not unusual.

“Does your parrot talk a lot?” the boy asked as they wove their way up the street.

“Too much,” Thad said. “And I don’t want to hear a great deal from you, either.”

“Bad boy, bad boy,” Dante muttered.

“Tsk!” Sofiya shook her head. “Such a dreadful thing to say to a child.”

“He isn’t a-”

“Ah! Here is the hotel.”

The hotel was wide and stolid, built to endure the steady Baltic winter. They left both horses in the stable next door. Thad was about to order the boy to stay there as well, but Sofiya took his-its-hand with an air of forced no-nonsense and led everyone inside past the desk man to a door on the second floor.

“Stay here,” she said, took a breath, and went into the room beyond. Thad felt guilty, as if he had sent her to take a punishment he himself deserved. Don’t be an idiot, he told himself, and waited in uneasy silence with the boy in the hallway. The floorboards were scuffed but clean, and glass-paned windows at either end of the corridor let in dim light.

“Have you killed a lot of clockworkers?” the boy asked.

“Yes,” Thad replied shortly.

“Is it hard?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you like doing it?”

That question caught Thad off guard. “I don’t know,” he answered without thinking.

“Does it make you happy? Your job is supposed to make you happy.”

“Is it?”

“In a family, the mother stays home to help the children and keep house and the father goes off to work every day, whistling and happy because he likes what he does and he knows he is earning money,” the boy said, ticking off points on his rag-wrapped fingers. “And the children have lessons or an apprenticeship or they play.”

“Do they? And what about poor families, when the father takes whatever work he can, and the mother has to work too, and the children as well?”

“That is very sad,” the boy replied.

Thad stared. “What do you know about sad?”

“It was very sad when Mr. Havoc opened up my head and moved things around. It gave me headaches and made me scared.”

Thad felt his mouth harden into a line. “You are a machine. You can’t feel anything. You can only do and say what Havoc punched into your wheels.”

The boy didn’t respond. He only looked at Thad for a long moment with those enormous eyes, and Thad found he couldn’t meet them. He looked at the door instead.

“Doom,” Dante muttered.

“Shut it, bird.”

“Why do you keep your parrot when he’s broken?” the boy asked suddenly.

“He reminds me of someone I used to know.” Thad’s words were clipped.

“You should fix him. And you shouldn’t be so mean to him. He might leave.”

“He won’t leave. He’s a machine, and he does what he’s told.”

“Applesauce,” said Dante.

The door opened and Sofiya, still looking pale, gestured for them to enter. Thad obeyed with relief-facing this mysterious employer’s wrath felt suddenly preferable to standing alone with the boy.

The chilly room beyond contained a bed, table, and a set of ladder-back chairs. On the table sat a box with a grill on one side and a wire trailing from the back. Several dials and buttons made a row beneath the grill.

Because they weren’t moving, it took Thad a moment to see the spiders.

Dozens and dozens of the them clung to the walls and ceiling. They took up every available inch of space. They ranged in size from ant to dachshund. Some had winding keys sticking out of their backs. Brass and iron claws gleamed. Their eyes glowed blue and red and green, and they were all pointed at Thad.

Cold fear gripped Thad. He stood rooted to the spot a few steps into the room. The boy gasped and hid behind Thad. Even Dante fell silent. Thad couldn’t move, couldn’t think. The quiet menace of all those clawed machines was worse than an army of thugs.

Sofiya coughed hard and gestured at Thad to take a chair. He swallowed hard and forced himself to obey while Sofiya twisted the dials on the box. Thad’s mouth was dry. The boy huddled behind Thad’s chair, trying to stay out of sight. The box squawked, gave a burst of static, then hummed softly. The spiders didn’t move, though their eyes never left Thad. The half dozen weapons he carried felt tiny and childish.

“Mr. Sharpe?” The voice from the box was low and pleasant, almost grandfatherly. “Are you there?”

Thad had to try twice before he could answer. “I am,” he said.

“Good. The connection is excellent. Miss Ekk tells me you failed to do what I hired you to do. I am glad to hear the truth, but I’d like to hear your side of it, of course. We’re all friends here.”

“Are we?” Thad said. “Who am I speaking to?”

“Your employer, of course.” The voice was smooth as chocolate and carried no trace of an accent that Thad recognized. British was all he could make out, but he couldn’t pin down a region.

Thad worked his jaw. “Are you a clockworker?”

“I told you he is stubborn,” Sofiya put in.

“You were quite correct, Miss Ekk. Mr. Sharpe, like you, I take from clockworkers.”

“Take?”

“I take their livelihoods, you take their lives. Really, we’re quite the same. We both have large collections, for example. What do you think of mine?”

“It takes my breath away,” Thad said. “But you didn’t answer my question.”

A low laugh. “Indeed. I am beyond such classifications, Mr. Sharpe.”

“You are a clockworker, then. Only a clockworker talks that way.” The familiar anger and hatred tinged Thad’s world red.

“You’re rather like a bulldog, Mr. Sharpe. I think I rather like you.”

“Do you?” Thad said through gritted teeth. Right then, he wanted to smash the box and its stupid grill, even though he knew it would do nothing to the man who manipulated it. Already his mind was running in a hundred directions, looking for weaknesses, searching for ideas. But clockworkers were highly intelligent, and Thad’s main strategy for dealing with them was to catch them by surprise, when their intelligence was of little use. This clockworker had taken plenty of time to plan. Thad needed more information before he could act. Best to keep himself under control and see what he could learn.

“What is your name, please?” he said with forced politeness. “Since you do like me.”

“Yes.” A bit of static came over the grill. “You may call me…Mr. Griffin.”