Steven Harper - The Havoc Machine

“Not with that,” Lord Power said. “Don’t you know? I am a clockworker-smarter, faster, better than you. Throw that knife at me, and I will catch it in midair.”

The figure beneath the sheet whimpered. David! Thad’s heart twisted, but he forced himself to concentrate on the clockworker and his crossbow. Dante, for reasons of his own, jumped up onto the table beside David and cocked his head.

“How lucky am I?” Lord Power continued. “I take one subject off the street, and a second one follows him in. You know, I learned so much when I sliced this boy’s-”

Thad threw the knife. Lord Power warily watched it come, but it arced high over his head.

“My turn.” Power re-aimed the crossbow with a giggle just as the knife crashed handle first into the jar marked OIL OF VITRIOL. Glass shattered, and the sulfuric acid inside cascaded over Power’s head and face. Smoke rose from his flesh, and he screamed in agony. The crossbow clattered to the floor. Lord Power screamed and screamed and screamed. The acid dissolved his hair and skin, revealing his skull. Power clawed at the remains of his face, but that only got the acid on the flesh of his hands, which also began to dissolve. Thad ran forward, snatched up the crossbow, and fired it into the man’s chest. Power stiffened, then dropped twitching to the floor.

“Bless my soul,” Dante said.

Thad flung the bow aside and tore the sheet away from the table.

In that moment, Thad understood how much he’d been hoping the figure under the sheet wasn’t David. That was how it worked in stories-the hero rips the barrier away, but surprise! The figure under the sheet is an animal or a dummy or another poor soul, someone you could feel sorry for even as you felt a guilty relief that it wasn’t your son. But the wreck on the table was undeniably his little boy David. The world closed around Thad’s heart like a rock and his knees buckled.

“Daddy?” David said in English. His eyes were shut and his voice was blurred, as if he were sleepy. “Daddy.”

Thad dropped the sheet back over David’s body with shaking hands. “I’m here. Daddy’s here, little star. The bad man is gone. Does…does it hurt?”

“I’m cold,” David whispered. His breathing was slow and it had bubbles in it. “I’m cold.”

Thad didn’t know what to do. His son was dying, and he could do nothing but watch. Why hadn’t he come a few minutes before? Why hadn’t he started searching just one hour earlier? When he sent David off to school that morning with a meat roll in his hand for breakfast, he’d had no way of knowing that this would be the last time he’d ever see David alive.

“I’m sorry, Daddy.” David coughed, and blood spattered his lip.

The pain in his voice made Thad have to lean on the table, and tears choked the back of his throat. He smoothed the hair on David’s forehead. “Why are you sorry, little star?” Little star was a name Thad had stopped using with David years ago, but he now found himself going back to it.

“I should…have…run…”

“No!” Thad couldn’t bear the thought that his dear, sweet boy would go into the afterlife feeling guilty. He hugged David despite the bloody sheet. “No, little star! It was my fault for not coming after you sooner. You are not to blame. Please believe me.” He was weeping openly now. He fumbled under the sheet for David’s hand and accidentally knocked Dante over. The parrot twitched.

“Recording,” Dante said. “Recording.”

“I…I…” David’s voice was growing fainter, and his hand was growing colder. “I…”

“What?” Thad pleaded.

“I love you, Daddy.” David exhaled once more and died.

Before he left the lab with David in his bloody shroud over one shoulder and Dante clinging to the other, Thad broke every jar and bottle he could find and dropped a candle into the mess. The liquid blazed up like a hungry demon. Thad didn’t stay to watch it burn. The last thing he saw was the flames licking the corpse of the clockworker. How many brothers and sisters in darkness did this creature have? How many clockworkers giggled behind their knives and needs, their machines and mechanicals?

“One less,” Thad spat. “And tomorrow, one more less. There will always be one more less.”

* * *

The tunnel under the castle widened into a dungeon. They always did. Thad did a quick check in the cells but found no prisoners in evidence. Strange. Usually he found at least one. Perhaps they were kept somewhere else.

He found the usual spiral staircase and used his collapsible baton to poke and prod his way upward. Nothing leaped out, no stairs collapsed, no terrible liquids gushed down toward him. At least the clockworker had installed glowing lights of some kind, however meager. The entire place looked dirty and gray. He emerged at the end of a long corridor and almost stumbled into an automaton.

The automaton was human-shaped, but Thad couldn’t tell much more in the dim light. He rammed a shoulder into it without thinking, but he wasn’t able to get much force behind the gesture. The automaton staggered, but recovered. It punched Thad in the chest with a heavy fist. Thad’s breath whooshed out of him and he nearly went down. The automaton made a buzzing sound-an alarm? — and Thad jabbed the baton at its face. The metal end drove straight into the machine’s head. There was a wet snap and gears ground like bad teeth. The automaton clawed at the baton sticking out of its face for a moment, then slowed and stopped. Like a brass tree going down, it toppled backward to the floor. The buzzing sound died.

“Bless my soul,” Dante said.

Thad braced his foot on the automaton’s shoulder and yanked the baton free. The automaton looked strange, even in the bad light. He bent for closer look, then drew back with a hiss. Half the automaton’s metal head was flesh. One side of a woman’s head had been stitched unevenly to a metal one with staples or wire. The tip of Thad’s baton was stained with blood. The vodka in Thad’s pocket felt very heavy.

Thad forced a number of reactions to the back of his mind. Later, when he had taken care of Havoc, he would have a private moment of horror and anxiety. Right now he was busy.

The corridor opened unexpectedly onto a balcony that ringed a large hall. On the floor a story below lay yet another dreadful laboratory. Thad had seen so many now that they were blurring together. Clockworkers focused on different areas of science-mechanics, physics, automatics, biology, chemistry, even astronomy-but their labs tended to have the same equipment. They almost always had a forge, since they had to design and create their own machinery. They usually had a great deal of glassware, mechanical parts, medical equipment, and, sadly, chains, cages, and other restraints near some kind of operating table. Thad’s all-too-experienced eye ran over the similarities and picked out differences. A stack of barrels in one corner. A large cooking stove in another. Shelves lined with jars, each one containing a human brain in fluid. And on a worktable amid a jumble of half-built spiders, a very different spider, a large one with ten legs instead of eight and intricate wires and carvings all over its body. Havoc’s machine. Of Havoc himself, there was no sign.

Thad narrowed his eyes. What was this machine and why did Sofiya’s employer want it so badly? It crossed his mind that the employer might be another clockworker, a rival, but Thad almost as quickly discarded the idea. Clockworkers didn’t work well with others. They became more and more self-centered and narcissistic as the plague progressed, and when they went into a sleepless fugue of inventing, they were singularly unpleasant to be around, which was one reason they built so many automatons-machines were the only beings that could withstand their abuse. The idea that an advanced clockworker might work so closely with normal people like Sofiya or Thad, even at a distance, seemed unlikely in the extreme. In any case, perhaps he should “accidentally” destroy the invention. Secret reasons for wanting it couldn’t be good reasons. On the other hand, he’d given his word and taken the money.