Steven Harper - The Havoc Machine

“Shut the damn door!” one of them barked in what Thad assumed was Lithuanian. Thanks to his mother, Thad spoke a number of Eastern European and Baltic languages, and his father had liked to joke that once you learned three of them, the fourth came free. Thad slammed the door, and most of the men went back to their drinking. Two, however, continued to stare at him.

“Dummy, dummy, dummy,” Dante muttered in Thad’s ear. “Stare and stare, here and there.” He squawked.

“Shut it.” Thad’s jaw was set in a line and his brown eyes were hard. Dark hair curled beneath a workman’s cap and he had no beard, but there his resemblance to the men in the tavern ended. His lean build, long leather jacket, and stout boots made him stand out among plain Lithuanian homespun. The ratty brass parrot on his shoulder didn’t help. Maybe he should duck out again and look for a way in through the back.

The two men, both large and callused, got up from their long benches and strode across the sticky tavern floor before Thad could retreat. One of them loomed over Thad, his breath heavy with vodka.

“I have heard of your parrot,” he said in thick Lithuanian. “You are the man who kills clockworkers. Many, many clockworkers.”

The knife was already in Thad’s hand. “What of it?” he replied, his own accent heavy with British vowels. The blade gleamed silver in the candlelight, though neither man seemed to notice. Thad was already calculating-one slash at the throat to incapacitate the first man, shove him backward into the second man, flee into the street. Dante’s forged feathers creaked in his ear as the parrot tensed.

The man clapped Thad on the shoulder. “I will buy your first drink,” he boomed. “And my brother will buy your second. Bartender! Vodka and giras for our new friend!”

Moments later, Thaddeus found himself wedged in at one of the splintery trestle tables with a clay mug by his left hand and a shot glass at his right. A dish of salt and a loaf of dark rye bread sat in front of him. The men at the table raised their own mugs and glasses to Thad, drained them, and wiped their mustaches with their sleeves in one smooth motion.

“So. How many clockworkers have you killed?” said the first man. His name was Arturas and his brother was Mykolas.

“I keep no count.” Thad raised his giras mug, tried a gulp, and suppressed a grimace. It was like drinking sour rye bread.

“Liar, liar, liar,” Dante croaked in his ear.

“Shut it,” Thad said, glad none of the men seemed to speak English.

“Who is this man, Arturas?” asked one of the other drinkers.

“This,” Arturas boomed in reply, “is the man who killed Erek the Terror outside Krakow and Vile Basia in the sewers of Prague. This is the man who killed countless monsters and saved a thousand lives. They say he walks the streets with a brass parrot on his shoulder and a cannon in his trousers.”

The men roared at that, and Thad, laughing but uncomfortable at the attention, raised his mug with an ironic grin.

“This man,” Mykolas added in conclusion, “is a hero.” He threw his free arm around Thad and clashed his glass against his brother’s. The other men, half-drunk, joined in, slopping giras and vodka onto the bread plate. Thad glanced about uneasily and pulled a small card from his coat pocket.

“So what does bring the mighty clockwork killer into a piss-hole like Busi Treeias?” Mykolas demanded.

“Hey!” said the bartender, who was arriving with more drinks.

Dante cocked his head and Thad glanced down at the card in his hand. In graceful script on one side was engraved a name in Cyrillic letters. On the back in black ink was scribbled 7.45 sharp, Busi Treeias. A ragged boy had handed him the card on the streets of Vilnius earlier that afternoon and fled before Thad could react. Busi Treeias was the name of the tavern. It meant “You’ll be third,” and it was the name that made Thad uneasy, though not so uneasy that he avoided the meeting.

The name on the card was Sofiya Ivanova Ekk, a Russian woman’s name, and Russian women did not frequent taverns in the Polish-Lithuanian Union. Neither did Polish-Lithuanian women, for that matter. He thought about asking the men at the table if they knew Sofiya Ekk, but had the feeling that they might think he was enquiring after a prostitute or, worse, someone’s sister.

“I thought I might have business here,” he said in his heavy Lithuanian. “But I seem to have made new friends instead.”

That brought on another smashing together of mugs and more knocking back of vodka. Thad tried the latter this time, and it burned a fiery trail down to his stomach. Tears streamed from his eyes. He hastily snatched up some bread, dipped it in salt, and wolfed it down.

A glass of honest-to-god beer landed in front of him. Startled, Thad looked up. The balding bartender withdrew his hand and jerked his head toward a corner of the bar. A figure wrapped in scarlet sat in a shadow far away from the red-hot stove. Thad clapped Arturas on the shoulder and picked up his beer. “I seem to have business after all.”

Arturas and the other men didn’t seem to mind, though they watched him curiously as he picked his way across the crowded room with his beer.

“Pretty, pretty, pretty boy,” Dante said. “Beer and crackers.”

When Thad arrived at the corner, the scarlet figure resolved itself into a woman in a hooded cloak of rich scarlet velvet, unfashionable but not unheard-of. The hood covered the upper half of her face, and an untouched glass of something red sat on the small table in front of her. She had an actual chair instead of a bench, and a matching chair waited across from her. The noise of the tavern seemed to die away as Thad gingerly sat down. He had talked to his share of women in taverns elsewhere, but these circumstances were definitely odd. They were also intriguing.

“Pretty, pretty, pretty,” Dante said again.

“Miss Ekk?” Thad put out a hand, half ready to snatch it back.

“I am that woman.” She shook hands. Her palm was smooth and soft. Thad wondered if she expected him to kiss the back, but he didn’t. Instead, he set his elbow on the table and let Dante walk down his arm. Dante did get heavy after a while. The parrot waddled over to investigate the unlit candle. Gears creaked uneasily through bare spots where brass feathers were missing or broken, and the bottom half of his beak was off-center, as if Dante had flown through a tornado and only barely lived to tell about it.

“I am thrilled you decided to come, Mr. Sharpe,” the woman said. Her English carried a Russian accent, and her voice was low and powerful.

“I’m a little surprised to find someone like you in a place like this, Miss Ekk,” Thad countered. His eyes flickered up and down her form, trying to assess her, but she wasn’t moving and the damned cloak hid everything. He couldn’t even tell how old she was.

“Someone like me?”

He gestured at the tavern. More than one person was still staring in their direction. Normally it would have made him more nervous, but right now he found it reassuring to have other eyes on him. “Proper females don’t go to bars in the Polish-Lithuanian Union. Or in Russia. They stay behind closed doors and do proper female things.”

“Rules are for people who think little, Mr. Sharpe. People like us, we think large. That is why I wished to meet you.”

“In a tavern with the name You’ll Be Third ?” Thad brandished the card.

“I believe the name shows that the place is very popular-there are always two people ahead of you waiting to be served. The name fits, no?”