Steven Harper - The Havoc Machine

“Bad boy, bad boy,” Dante said softly.

Thad ignored him and raised the candle. The light revealed a simple earthen pit, as he had been expecting. It also revealed a grated gate set in one wall, as he had been hoping. The padlock that held it shut was simple.

“Ha,” he said under his breath.

Havoc hadn’t left the castle gate unsecured in a moment of foolishness, as Sofiya had thought. The crafty bugger had left it open as bait. Thad had seen this kind of thing before. More than one person had used the gate to enter the castle, fallen into the pit, and become fodder for Havoc’s experiments. It was also why there were no alarms or automaton guards-Havoc wanted people to come in. The place was a gingerbread house.

Dante obligingly held the candle in one claw while Thad’s picks got the lock open. No need to put heavy security on a gate when the people on the other side were suffering from broken bones. A tunnel beyond it led beneath the courtyard and, Thad assumed, straight into the keep. He took the candle back from Dante and cautiously moved down the tunnel. It was probably safe to assume that the tunnel would be unguarded and without traps for the same reason the gate had been only lightly locked, but the paranoia Sofiya had mentioned earlier forced him to stay alert. He watched for wires and irregularities in the earthen floor and anything at all that looked like brass or steam. But he saw nothing except a dank earthen tunnel braced with wood.

What was Havoc like? Sofiya had had little information to give him. The moniker Mr. indicated he was a man, but how old was he? What did he look like? How had he encountered the clockwork plague? Did he have relatives? Children? What had become of them?

Thad tried to clamp down on the last line of thought, but the tunnel offered few distractions, and it came along even so. Once the plague took a clockworker’s mind, he-or she-didn’t care about people. All that mattered was the experiment, the science, the invention. Thad had come across his third clockworker in the process of making an airship out of human skin. His second had perfected a vivisection device and had gone from testing it on dogs and cats to apes stolen from a zoo and finally to people-five in all, including two children. And his first clockworker-

The candle held back the darkness, but not the guilt. It closed around Thad like a fist and stole his breath. He had to force himself to keep walking.

His first clockworker…

Thad still couldn’t put it into words. David was his life seemed trite, or maybe just understated, like saying it was nice to have air when you lived underwater. His dear Ekaterina had died in the birthing bed, leaving Thad the sole and frightened caretaker of a crying, pink bundle of curiosity with his mother’s blue eyes and red-brown hair. Thad had considered running back to the circus, the one he had left to marry Ekaterina in the first place, but Ekaterina’s mother had persuaded him to stay, and Thad had realized that with David in his life, it would be easier to stay on in Warsaw as a knife sharpener and tinsmith than return to his parents’ life of knife throwing and stage magic.

The early years had been difficult. Thad had no interest in remarrying, which meant he took care of both business and home, though Ekaterina’s aging mother helped as best she could. David grew quickly and got into everything, a dangerous prospect in the shop of a knife man, and Thad found himself almost slavishly devoted to this small, yet strangely enormous, presence in his life. David, for his part, clung ferociously to his father. With a sense of wonder and awe, Thad watched David learn to walk, run, play with other children, ask to help in the little shop, and every day Thad saw something of Ekaterina in him-her laugh, her hair, her smile.

The two of them soldiered through life together. Together they endured hard work and loneliness and even the death of Ekaterina’s mother one long winter. Slowly, Thad began to heal. When David was six, Thad scraped up the money to enroll him in school and endured the little pang in his heart each day when David left in the morning and suffered the little sting when he returned in the afternoon to talk about students and teachers and playmates Thad had never met.

And then one afternoon, David didn’t return home. At first Thad thought nothing of it. David had simply gotten caught up in a game with some other boys or paused at the sweets shop again. But as the afternoon turned to evening, Thad became worried, then frightened, then frantic. He barely remembered the hours of searching, of asking everyone along David’s route home what they had seen, until a baker, in his shop for the night’s baking, mentioned seeing a boy matching David’s description, right down to the color of his shirt and the school books flung over his back. The baker had seen the boy get into a carriage-or perhaps he’d been snatched, the baker wasn’t certain. What the man did remember was that the carriage bore the crest of the mayor.

Thad stiffened. Mayor Teodor de Langeron, a prince of French and Russian descent, had no sons, but rumor had it that one of his numerous nephews had contracted the clockwork plague. Some of the wilder speculations said he’d become a clockworker.

And it was quite impossible to expect the police to interfere in the affairs of a prince’s family.

Even now, Thad only vaguely recalled stripping the knife shop of its blades and digging out his old stage-magic trunk. He did remember posing as a servant to get onto the palace grounds where the mayor’s family lived and terrorizing a young maid into telling him where to find the nephew, who was already insisting that people call him Lord Power instead of by his birth name Henryk, a clear sign that the plague had taken his mind. Lord Power lived in cellars beneath the palace, another sign.

Fortunately for Thad, Lord Power still felt safe in his family home and hadn’t decided to build traps yet. Thad only ran across this habit later. Every step along the endless cellar corridors and storerooms was a nightmare. Twice he got lost and had to backtrack. Another time his candle went out, and his hands were shaking so hard, he couldn’t relight it. A piping cry for help brought his head around. David’s voice! He followed the sound, terrified. Every delay meant more pain for David. Thad rounded a stony corner and the cry for help sounded right in his ear. Thad swiped at the sound by reflex and knocked a brass parrot off a wall perch. It clanged to the floor, knocking its beak askew.

“Danger! Danger!” the parrot squawked. “Master! Danger!”

Thad kicked it, and the parrot smashed into the wall. It lost an eye and several metal feathers. “Shut it!” Thad snarled.

In answer, the parrot screamed for help in David’s voice again. The sound turned Thad’s blood to ice. The bird was somehow reproducing David’s voice, and that meant Lord Power was probably somewhere nearby. A door just down the corridor showed a crack of light at the bottom. Thad smashed into it without hesitation. The damp wood gave way and he stumbled into the room beyond.

Small cages lined the walls. Each contained a bloody, mangled human corpse. Shelves of dreadful equipment took up one wall, and the top shelf was lined with enormous jars of clear fluid, each with a white label-OIL OF VITRIOL, SPIRITS OF SALT, AQUA FORTIS. Near the shelves stood an operating table with a bloody sheet draped over it. Standing next to it was a tall man with a potbelly and a receding hairline. He was training a complicated-looking crossbow on Thad.

“Dante gave me plenty of warning,” Lord Power said just as the mechanical parrot waddled into the room. “Don’t move, and don’t think about throwing that knife.”

Thad gripped the blade. He didn’t even remember drawing it. “I’ll kill you.”