Steven Harper - The Havoc Machine

Thad folded his arms in a shaky bit of bravado that Mr. Griffin couldn’t see and forced himself to get a grip, push his problems aside and concentrate, as if he were in the ring. Problems didn’t matter in the ring, only the performance. He would deal with the loss of Blackie and the boy’s presence and the anger and the sorrow later. Right now he had to deal with other things. This room was a ring, and in the ring Thad could swallow any number of swords without blinking.

“That’s the length of it?” he said. “You need to get to Russia? Hire a coach. Buy a train ticket.” And don’t notice that I’m following you with my blades drawn.

“It’s more complicated than that. You had interactions with the peasants in the village. What was it like?”

Thad remembered the knives and the pitchforks and the tension in the crowd when he and Sofiya had first arrived back in the village. He also remembered how poor the villagers had been and how wealthy he and Sofiya appeared to be.

“Tense,” he said.

“These are bad economic times.” Sofiya sat pale and regal in her chair. “The landowners wring every kopeck from the peasants in both Russia and in the Polish-Lithuanian Union, and they spend the coins on their own lavish lifestyles. They draft the young men into their armies and force the young women to work in their palaces. The common people are slaves in all but name.”

“You sound like you have experience with that,” Thad observed.

“I am a peasant, Mr. Sharpe,” she replied. “Does that shock you?”

“You don’t act like a peasant.”

“And you don’t act like a human being. The world is an incredible place.”

“Now, look-”

“At any rate,” Mr. Griffin interrupted through his speaker, “peasant resentment to this treatment is increasing. In addition, the Ukrainian Empire has fallen apart, and that has emboldened the peasants elsewhere. Vilnius is quiet, but farther out, feelings have become, to use your word, tense. No one has actually attacked a landowner’s stronghold yet, but the peasantry has begun to express its displeasure in other ways. Telegraph lines are cut. Herds owned by the landowner are raided by ‘wolves.’ Coaches are robbed. And the state-owned trains, ones that transport passengers and conscripted troops, are sabotaged. All of this, you see, is a roundabout way of saying that coach and train travel between here and Saint Petersburg has become dreadfully unreliable, and I’m afraid I cannot stomach the unreliable.” Mr. Griffin gave a chocolatey chuckle, as if he had made a private joke.

Thad put his hands on his knees. “So you want me to find a reliable way.”

“No. I’ve already found one. I need you to finish it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t. I haven’t explained it yet,” Mr. Griffin snapped. “As you can see, Mr. Sharpe, I travel with a great deal of luggage, enough to take up two train cars. You are going to get those train cars to Saint Petersburg by the end of the week.”

“By hauling them myself?”

“I selected you as an employee for two reasons, Mr. Sharpe. The first was that you were the best candidate to get Havoc’s invention. You failed. The second reason is that you are attached to a circus train.”

A dreadful light dawned. Thad’s mouth went dry. Now more people were getting involved. He had to talk fast. “Look, the Kalakos Circus isn’t a passenger train. You can’t ask Ringmaster Dodd to take on-”

The spiders clacked their claws in unison again, cutting Thad off. The memory of Blackie’s last scream echoed in his head.

“You will persuade the ringmaster,” Mr. Griffin’s smooth voice said. “You will use my money and your words and whatever actions you feel will accomplish this task. You will keep any particulars you have deduced about me to yourself. You will definitely not tell the circus anything about my nature or about the circumstances of our dealings. You will remember that my spiders are watching. They are watching that parrot you’re so fond of. They are watching Ringmaster Dodd and his circus. They are watching the boy. And they are watching you.”

Thad got to his feet, pale as Sofiya. “You’ll get your damned train.”

“So glad to hear it,” Mr. Griffin said.

“And once you arrive in Russia,” Thad added, “we’re finished. You go your way, and I go mine.”

Mr. Griffin said, “Just tell your ringmaster that the tsar loves a circus.”

* * *

The signal touched the machine with a soft finger. It awoke, moved all ten legs, and felt its way through darkness. There were obstacles in its way, some hard, some soft, some sticky. The machine pushed them aside or found a way round them. Once it had to pull its legs in tight and scoot on its belly. Through it all, the signal’s haunting melody pulled it forward.

The obstacles ended. The machine spiraled down a long staircase, skittered down a stone passageway, and found itself in a deep pit. Without pausing, it climbed the walls and pushed aside the long, thin objects dangling near at top. It sensed a vague warmth overhead and saw shapes of other objects around it. The machine didn’t pause to make sense of anything-the signal continued its pull.

Freed of constraint now, the machine ran. Some of the objects it encountered jumped back and made sounds, but the machine kept running. Eventually it came to a long line of boxy objects sitting on metal wheels. The signal beckoned. Other objects moved about the machine in a rushed cacophony of sound and light and heat. If these objects noticed the machine, they didn’t react to it. The machine dashed up to the boxlike object that was emitting the sweet signal, crawled underneath to the metal undercarriage, and clamped all ten legs to a metal bar.

It waited.

Drums rolled and the sword slid into Thad’s stomach. He kept his breathing deep and even to suppress his gag reflex, and he held the pommel just above his teeth while he stared straight up at the canvas peak of the Tilt, holding his neck and esophagus perfectly straight. Already the Flying Tortellis were climbing into the rigging in their bright outfits, ready to fly on the trapezes once Thad was done.

Thad let go of the sword, and the drumroll ended with a cymbal smash. The blunted tip was digging into the bottom of his stomach. He held the position and spread his arms.

“Bless my soul!” Dante whistled from his shoulder.

Always at this moment, the blade divided Thad between life and death. A wrong move-a cough, a sneeze, a swallow-and he would die. And yet he felt no fear. Here he had control of his body, of the sword, even of the audience. Anything that happened would come solely from him. He hung there, divided, for a moment longer, then he then drew the blade back out in a swift hand-under-hand movement and swept into a bow.

The audience gave a scattering of applause. Thad’s performance wasn’t at fault-the grandstand wasn’t even a third full. Unfortunately, Vilnius, like the rest of the region, was enduring economic bad times and not many people had coins to spare for the circus.

Thad, who was wearing a pirate costume that Dante nicely completed, wiped the sword clean with a handkerchief he kept at his belt and sheathed the sword as Dodd, the ringmaster, dashed into the ring with his cane and his red-and-white-striped dress shirt and his scarlet top hat.

“Thaddeus Sharpe,” he boomed, and the limp applause stirred itself to something resembling life. Thad trotted out of the ring as Dodd announced the Flying Tortellis.

Sofiya in her cloak and the boy in his rags were waiting for him just outside the back entrance flap for the performers. The sky was overcast with damp gray clouds that threatened rain at any moment and the air carried a chill, which added nothing to the circus atmosphere.