Steven Harper - The Havoc Machine

“About face! Forward march!”

The automaton reversed itself and dragged the clockworker to Alexei, who halted the machine and turned to the assembled crowd. “What are you waiting for? Come and play!”

A few courtiers, mostly men but a few women, trundled down the steps to the field. Alexei drew back his foot and kicked the clockworker in the gut. Thad winced at the sound of boot meeting flesh. The clockworker gasped for air and tried to double over, but his chains prevented it. One of the other men was carrying a cane, and he smacked the clockworker in the face with it. Another man threw a rock at the clockworker, while a woman timidly nudged at him with her toe, then backed away with a giggle. In the grandstand, the tsarina looked on, waving her fan within her own cage of wire.

“He built that automaton, and all the others,” Sofiya murmured. “They force him to build these things for Mother Russia, and then they do this to him. It is how every clockworker in Russia finds an end.”

Other courtiers came down from the stands now. They crowded around the clockworker and Thad couldn’t see much. They kicked and punched, and his howls and screams grew more agonized. Sofiya’s lips grew pale. Thad wanted to leave or least look away, but he was rooted to the spot and couldn’t move. He was immensely glad that Nikolai wasn’t anywhere near. The servants and other commoners gathered nearby watched with rapt attention, and applauded or cheered whenever the court did. The soldiers remained at attention, though their eyes remained on the show.

“Enough now!” Alexei barked. Everyone backed away, revealing the clockworker. His face was a ruin, and blood streamed from his nose over a mouth filled with broken teeth. Both eyes were swollen shut, and his abraded body was covered in bruises and open wounds. Thad was torn between throwing up and wanting to fire a pistol between the man’s eyes to end his misery.

“The island,” he gasped. “They will take the island surrounded by water that runs like silver, and even the cannons won’t touch them.”

Alexei shouted a command at the other automatons. They blinked to life as well, and the court scattered with shouts and squeals. Alexei dodged out of the way as all the automatons converged on their inventor. This time Thad did look away, though he couldn’t close his ears. The clockworker’s screams were mercifully brief, but the awful ripping and tearing sounds went on and on. Thad remembered Blackie. When the automatons backed away, their arms and bodies bloody, there was little left. The court applauded.

“Everyone,” Sofiya said tightly, “loves a circus.”

Thad didn’t respond. The court started the long, involved process of filing out of the grandstand. First the tsarina on the arm of her son, followed by higher-ranking courtiers, then the lower ones. The little automatons zipped about, cleaning up the detritus. The soldiers and servants waited in their places. Behind the grandstand on the road that encircled the Field of Mars, a line of carriages waited to carry the court away.

“Now my favor,” Sofiya said. “The one I asked you to do for me back in the wagon.”

“Oh.” Nonplussed, Thad flexed his new hand again. “What is it?”

“Before that happens to me,” she nodded at the mess on the field, “I wish for you to promise you will cut my throat first.”

Thad looked at the red mess on the Field beside the golden cage. With no one to command them, the automatons had gone motionless again. Overheard circled a pair of ravens. He shuddered and averted his eyes. “I understand. I can’t say it’ll be my pleasure, but I’ll do my best.”

“Thank you.” She squeezed his arm again. “Nikolai has been worried about you. We should go to him.”

“Where is he?”

“Probably in the Tilt.”

* * *

The Tortellis were flying in the rigging high overhead, and Thad and Sofiya arrived in the Tilt just in time to see Loreta Tortelli, her dark hair pulled into tight braids around her head, somersault twice in midair. Her father Alberto caught her wrists with a slap of flesh on flesh.

“Tighter next time!” called her mother, Francesca, from the platform in Italian. “You almost didn’t make the turn.”

To one side, Hank and Margaretta Stilgore were working on their stilt walker act in full costume. They played caricatures of a businessman and his wife. Long trousers and skirts hid the stilts, making their legs look garishly long. Hank strode about with a cane the length of a harvesting rake while Margaretta had one of Tina McGee’s poodles on a very long leash. Mordovo sat in the grandstand wearing his long coat. He flicked his hand and a playing card appeared in it. He flicked it again and the card vanished. Mordovo shook his head, flicked his hand again. A line of twelve white horses trotted in through the front entrance. They entered the ring and went into what looked to Thad like a perfect canter around the ring, though the girl standing in the center with a long buggy whip occasionally tapped one to make corrections. There was a tension in the air. Only a few days ago in Vilnius, they’d been barely putting cheeks on the boards, as Thad’s father liked to say. Now they had to be up for performing for the tsar of all Russia. Thad wiggled his new hand. He was both disappointed to miss the opportunity and glad he didn’t have to worry about it.

They found Nikolai sitting on Kalvis, the mechanical horse, with Dante perched on the horse’s withers. Nikolai was drinking a bottle of whisky and watching the rehearsals. Next to him on the horse’s back was what looked like a peanut bag. He had taken off his hood and scarf. His half-mechanical, half-human face sent a squirm down Thad’s spine, and he wanted to tell the boy to cover up. But no one else seemed to care. They knew who-what-Nikolai was, so what as the point? It still felt wrong to Thad, and he felt oddly guilty that it felt wrong, and once again he found himself caught between opposing emotions. He didn’t care for the sensation.

Kalvis was fully polished, and his brassy skin gleamed like gold. Steam snorted from his nostrils, and he raised his head when Sofiya came near.

“Did you miss me, my magnificent one?” she asked him in Russian, and Kalvis snorted more steam.

Dante caught sight of Thad. He bobbed up and down. “Bless my soul! Bless my soul!”

“You’re awake!” Nikolai slid from Kalvis’s back and dashed to him, peanut bag in one hand, whisky bottle in the other.

Without thinking, Thad picked him up and swept him into the air, just like he would have David. Nikolai laughed in his perfect little boy voice. Then Thad realized what he was doing, and quickly set him down.

“I’m glad you came awake,” Nikolai said. “It made me nervous that your hand was chopped off and you wouldn’t wake up, even when you got your new one.”

“I’m fine now,” Thad said, a little disgruntled, though he wasn’t sure whom he was disgruntled toward. Then he said, “Are you taller?”

Nikolai shrugged, emptied the whisky bottle down his throat, and shoved it into his pocket. Thad put a hand on Nikolai’s head and measured him against his own body, trying to remember exactly how tall the boy had been before.

“Is he taller?” Thad asked Sofiya, who was cooing at Kalvis. “How is that possible?”

“I did not build him.” Sofiya draped her scarlet cloak across Kalvis’s back. “You are a fine, fine horse. Yes, you are. Yes, you are. And we are going to ride for the tsar. And he will shower us with praise and riches and you will have all the paraffin oil you can burn. Yes, you will.”

“How long was I asleep?” Thad asked. With all that had happened, it hadn’t occurred to him to ask yet. Automatically, he plucked Dante from Kalvis’s back and set the parrot on his shoulder. Dante nibbled with apparent affection at Thad’s cheek, then abruptly bit his ear. Thad knocked him on the head with a knuckle and Dante subsided.