Steven Harper - The Havoc Machine

No. He clenched his left hand and forced the fingers to work. He had some control here. Sofiya was a tremendous asset, and so was Nikolai. Thad also had money and weapons and years of experience hunting clockworkers. As a last resort, Thad could bring the circus in on the problem. Mr. Griffin wanted Thad to think he was helpless, and he would not give in.

Sofiya finished buying a hat for herself, then turned to Thad. “And what did you do with Nikolai?”

Thad glanced around with a start. Nikolai was nowhere to be seen. A cold knife slipped into Thad’s stomach and he spun away from the haberdasher’s blanket to scan the bustling, ever-shifting quilt of the market. Adrenaline zipped through his veins and blood drummed in his ears. He was on the streets of Warsaw again, and David had disappeared. Without a word, he thrust the bundles he was carrying into the arms of the startled hat seller and he rushed away calling Nikolai’s name with Sofiya right behind him.

“When did you see him last?” Sofiya demanded.

“Just a moment ago,” Thad growled. “He can’t have gotten far. Nikolai!”

The crowd swirled around them like confused fish, bumping and shoving and cursing at them. Thad, who was trying to scan the marketplace, stumbled and leaped and stepped on things as he ran, eliciting shouts from merchants and customers alike.

“Wait!” Sofiya caught his arm. “Thad, wait!”

“Someone took him!” Thad panted. “We have to find him!”

“Bad,” said Dante. “Very bad.”

“We will not find him by blundering about.” She pulled from her pocket a handful of tiny coins and gave one to a beggar girl, and another to a dirty-faced boy. “We are looking for a lost automaton who looks like a little boy. His name is Nikolai. Tell everyone you know the lady in the scarlet cloak will give a quarter kopeck to anyone who helps us look, and fifty kopecks to anyone who finds him.”

The children fled. Thad forced himself to slow down, fight the panic. He should retrace his steps, see if Nikolai had gone back to the cab, or just followed a familiar route. It was a place to start, at any rate. He turned to do just that. Sofiya spread more coins as they went, attracting more beggars and street children.

Thad spotted their blue-coated driver, who was dozing in the seat of the cab with his hat pulled down over his eyes. No sign of Nikolai.

A child in a filthy, heavily patched dress tugged on Sofiya’s cloak and pointed to the mouth of an alley at the edge of the market perhaps twenty yards away. “Is that him, lady?”

They came to a halt. Nikolai was talking to an adult man and a boy in his teens. The man put his hand on Nikolai’s shoulder, and the three of them faded into the alley.

“Nikolai!” Thad was already running again, not caring who he hit or stepped on. Sofiya flung a handful of money at the little girl, probably a lifetime of beggar’s income, and bolted after him. They tore down the muddy alley, and the sunlight vanished as if they’d entered a cave. Human refuse and slippery garbage squished and sucked at Thad’s boots, and Sofiya clutched her skirts about her, trying not to trip. Dante clung to Thad’s shoulder so hard his claws pierced the leather jacket and pricked Thad’s skin.

“Nikolai!” Thad shouted. “Niko!” Buildings of brick and wood and even logs loomed high above them, leaning over the narrow alley and muffling sound. A three-way intersection split the alley ahead of them, and Thad halted, calling Nikolai’s name again.

“That way!” Sofiya pointed down one of the alleys. “I hear him.”

For the first time in his life, Thad was glad of a clockworker’s sharp senses. They hurried up the alley, muck and slime still spattering them. Rats the size of shoe boxes grudgingly gave way, and someone from above emptied a chamber pot, missing them by inches and splashing Thad’s trousers. Thad ran on.

And then Thad saw a doorway. The man and the teenaged boy were there with Nikolai and two more men, all hovering like wraiths in the dim, fetid shadows. Thad rushed toward them as best he could over the slippery mud. The men, dressed in ragged peasant clothes, came alert.

“You have Nikolai,” Thad said in Russian. “He belongs to me. Give him back.”

“Yours, friend?” said the first man. “We found an automaton wandering around the market with no owner in sight and no papers on him to prove who he belongs to. That makes him ours, free and clear. He’s worth something.”

Thad dropped into the role of hunter. A cold feeling of balance came over him, the same feeling he had when he slid a sword into his throat in the ring. Emotion slipped away, leaving behind nothing but the edge of a knife and allowing him to assess everything around him. Two of the men were shorter than he, but broader and more muscular. The leader was taller than Thad and proportionately heavier. The boy was young and thin. Thad noted two knives and a cudgel. There might have been other weapons he couldn’t see. Automatically he brought his hands down to pop his own spring-loaded blades into palms, and then remembered that he hadn’t strapped them on-he’d been too discombobulated by his new hand and by Sofiya’s presence in his wagon while he was dressing to remember knives or a pistol. He dug a foot into the squelching mixture of mud and shit and switched to English, which he doubted the men understood.

“Nikolai, are you all right?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. I didn’t know-”

“Everything will be fine.” Sofiya held up a hand and spoke again in Russian. “These respectable men found you and they are returning you to us, and that is a fine thing. No one will get hurt now.”

“Doom,” said Dante.

“So?” said the leader. “Perhaps that is not true. Perhaps we will-”

Thad didn’t bother listening to the rest. He kicked a bootful of muck into the leader’s face. The leader yowled like an angry cat and Thad went for the man with the cudgel. Dante leaped free as Thad rammed a shoulder into the man, who went down. Unfortunately, Thad slipped and went with him. They fell in a tangle of arms and legs to the stinking mud. The man clouted Thad on the side of the head. There was no pain-not yet-and Thad slammed the heel of his brass palm under the man’s chin. There was a crack and the man went limp. Thad rolled free.

The leader cleared his eyes and the third man was moving in on Sofiya. He snapped out a hand and grabbed her wrist. Sofiya blinked at him, like a barracuda deigning to notice a minnow that had bumped it. In a blur of movement, she wrenched the third man around and slammed him face-first into the wall. Her foot lashed up behind her, despite her skirts, and caught the leader in the midriff. The leader folded, and with catlike speed Sofiya spun in time to smash his face into her knee. Clockworker reflexes. The man whose face went into the wall slid down into the mud. Sofiya, her face a mask of ice, kicked the leader in the head. He twitched and went still.

To Thad’s complete surprise, Nikolai slammed the heel of his own palm under the teenaged boy’s chin in an exact duplicate of Thad’s movement, then lashed up with his foot just like Sofiya had done to catch him in the knee-he couldn’t reach the midriff. The teenaged boy dropped, groaning, into the mud.

“Sharpe is…sharrrrrrp.” Dante was sitting breast deep in muck, his exposed gears grinding. “Dooooommm…” His voice slowed and faded.

“Shit.” Thad levered himself to hands and knees. His head was hurting now. “Damn it all!”

“Shit,” Nikolai said. “Damn it all!”

“Don’t you start.” Thad tried to wipe smelly mud from his face and only succeeded in smearing it around. “Those words are for adults, not…automatons.”