Steven Harper - The Havoc Machine

“I am sorry,” Sofiya said at last.

Thad glanced at her. That was unexpected. But talking with Sofiya was like walking blindfolded through a bomb field. One moment she was explosive, the next she was refined, and he could never tell which was coming. “Sorry for what?”

“For the death of your son. And, I assume, of your wife. I assume a clockworker was involved.”

“How did-” He cut himself off. “Never mind. I don’t talk about it.”

“Nevertheless. It was not my intention to cause you pain, and I apologize. I only want the invention.”

“And I want the clockworker dead. We can both have what we want.”

“That would be a small miracle, Mr. Sharpe. But I will settle for Havoc’s machine.”

Thad shifted in the saddle. “What does this machine do, anyway?”

“I have no idea. And before you ask, I do not know why our employer wants it, either. That does worry me somewhat.”

“Oh?”

“I do not wish to give him a clockworker invention that might hurt a lot of people. So I will have to examine it closely. That is another reason why I am coming along, you see.”

That surprised Thad. “But you work for him.”

“And yet I somehow still think for myself. Do you find this so incredible?”

They reached a village of peasant houses. Like most in this region, the dwellings were low buildings made of logs or sod and topped with thatch. None had windows-they were too poor for that-and no lights burned anywhere. At this time of night, everyone was in bed. Thad judged that they had two or two and a half hours before sunrise. The dirt road threaded between the houses, forked west, and rose up a high hill. Atop the hill, Thad could just make out the silhouette of stone buildings. It seemed to him there should been a storm, or a least a rumble of thunder, but the night was calm and clear.

As they neared the edge of the village, one of the doors opened a crack and a woman peered out, probably wakened by their hoofbeats. When she saw the direction Thad and Sofiya were heading, she ran out into the road, heedless of her bedclothes and her nightcap.

“You must not go this way!” she called in desperate Lithuanian. “You must not!”

Thad halted. “We will be fine, mistress.”

“No! You must not!” She ran up and caught Blackie’s bridle. He snorted and tried to toss his head, but she clung hard. “That way is the path of a demon!”

“A clockworker?” Thad asked.

“An evil man.” Her eyes were pleading. She looked barely older than Thad himself. “He has taken many people from Juodsilai and done terrible things to them. We have begged the Cup Bearer and the Master of the Hunt to help us, but they do nothing. He took my sister…”

“I am sorry,” Sofiya said for the second time that evening.

“Vilma!” A man in a nightshirt was standing in the doorway. “Come away!”

“The demon comes out at night. If you need a place to stay, come to our house. My husband will not like it, but-”

Thad reached down and gently freed Blackie’s bridle from her hand. “I am not the Master of the Hunt, mistress, but I have come to destroy the demon clockworker.”

“Death, doom, destruction, despair,” Dante said.

“Truly?” The woman clasped Thad’s hand and kissed it several times. “Thank you, my lord. Thank you, thank you so much. Wait!”

The woman dashed past her surprised husband into the house and emerged a moment later with a small jug and a cloth-wrapped bundle. “Take these,” she said.

Thad recognized both objects by smell. The bundle was rye bread and the little jug contained a homemade vodka strong enough to make his eyes water. He thought about refusing such a rich gift from a poor household, but the woman’s expression was powerfully earnest. Thad also recognized the gesture for what it was. The memory of his own loss made his throat close up as he met Vilma’s eyes. She understood, and turning down her sacrifice was unthinkable. So was refusing to face Havoc.

“Thank you,” he said. With the gravity of a priest, he slipped the objects into the capacious pockets of his coat. “What was your sister’s name?”

“Olga.”

“I will make sure that word is the last sound he hears, Mistress Vilma.”

Without another word, he turned Blackie and rode away with Sofiya close behind. For once, Sofiya didn’t speak.

They climbed the hill, which was dotted with birch trees whose bark and leaves turned to silver and paper beneath the moon. Halfway up, Thad dismounted near a birch grove and put Dante on his shoulder. Frost had already killed off the insects, and the birds had migrated long ago, leaving the night eerily devoid of life sounds. Anticipation mingled with uncertainty in Thad’s chest, and he found himself checking his weapons over and over-stilettos, revolvers, bullets, knives, stilettos, revolvers, bullets, knives. He had other equipment as well: silk rope, lock picks, a small hacksaw, matches, and other handy objects. His fingers itched, and he couldn’t sit still. Evil rested at the top of that hill, an evil that terrorized men and killed women’s sisters, and for once Thad would strike it before it struck him.

“You stay here,” he told Sofiya. “After this point, the horses-and you-will be a nuisance.”

“As you wish. Perhaps I will nap.” Sofiya made her horse kneel, and she spread her cloak in a half circle in the brass shelter of its body. “Remember, the invention is a spider with ten legs instead of eight and-”

“-it has strange markings,” Thad finished for her. “I remember.”

“Sharpe is sharp,” Dante squawked. “Doom!”

“No talking, bird,” Thad told him, “unless you want Havoc to extract your gears with a spoon.”

Dante settled his feathers with a clatter, but didn’t respond. Thad touched his knives one more time, then headed up the road toward the ruins and the clockworker named Havoc.

Thaddeus Sharpe scanned the castle ruins with a practiced eye. In his considerable experience, clockworkers liked hidden, enclosed spaces. Castles, sewers, underground rooms, and similar places made them feel safe, like rats in a burrow. Ruins gave them the solitude they often craved; clockworkers did not work well with others. They fell to arguing too easily and tore one another to pieces, sometimes literally. Thad had once managed to set one clockworker on another, and the results had been tremendously satisfying.

He examined Havoc’s castle from a safe distance, automatically cataloging it and sizing it up. The castle wasn’t a single building, of course. It was a little complex of outbuildings and a main keep bent in a rectangle around a courtyard, all in stony ruins. The keep and some of the outbuildings were surrounded by a fragmented stone wall that had originally been at least three stories tall but was now tumbling down in most places to the point where Thad could probably peer over it on tiptoe. The moat had dried up long ago. Vines crawled over everything, and trees poked through shattered rooftops. It reminded Thad a little of the circus, with a main tent holding court over several smaller ones, except here every shadow held a potential trap. Each hole was also a potential weak spot, and the cracks over there might be good for climbing. Up top, however, the gleam of moonlight revealed toothy spikes poking out of the wall, clear signs of recent human habitation, and Thad was fairly certain that said spikes would be poisoned or otherwise rendered unpleasant. A new portcullis blocked the main gate, and Thad saw no mechanisms for raising it on this side. He would have been surprised to find any. A roofless corner tower about forty yards away had half collapsed, and Thad discarded it as a source of danger, at least from this distance.