Steven Harper - The Impossible Cube

The trouble was, they didn’t know exactly where they were running to. Gavin’s keen ears tracked the sound of the two shots to a general area perhaps six or seven blocks away, but when they arrived at the place, they found nothing but an empty street.

“Here!” Alice plucked a pair of pistols from the pave stones as another plague zombie shuffled into shadow. The pistols were bent and broken. “Good heavens. What do-?”

“Sh!” Gavin held up a hand, hoping, and for once the clockwork plague cooperated. It rushed through him, thinning the world, making it transparent. Scents of oil and carbon and phosphorous floated on the air as conspicuous as feathers. Bits and beams of light rushed in a trillion directions, bouncing and battering against one another, trying to make a pattern amid their own chaos. Vibrations small and thunderous moved stone and brick and air and water, pressing and moving and swirling the mix. He felt the steady thrum and thud of factory dynamos in the distance, sensed thousands of heartbeats from the people tending them, felt electricity flick and dance. Through it all, he heard a steady pattern, a click-clack, click-clack combined with the hiss and swoop of steam trapped in a metal tube. The bird.

“This way,” he said, taking Alice’s hand. “Hurry!”

They followed Gavin’s heightened hearing, tripping on curbs and stumbling on cobblestones because Gavin remained more intent on listening to directions than on watching where he was going. The neighborhood shifted from lower-class residential to a mercantile district, with signs in Cyrillic that hovered at the edge of Gavin’s understanding, and he became aware that if he stopped and studied them long enough, they would begin to make sense, but he didn’t stop. The click-clack, click-clack continued, growing louder. Ivana was taking her time, which allowed them to catch up. At last, puffing and sweating, they came to a street that ended in an enormous courtyard with a spurting fountain in the center. Beyond the fountain stood a high wall that surrounded an enormous mansion of white stone topped by yet more gargoyles and grotesques. An automaton in the curved armor and metal skirt of an old-fashioned Cossack warrior was opening a double-wide iron gate with a

and a 3 wrought into the center to admit Ivana and her bird. The claw-cum-cage that made up the bird’s head was closed again, and inside it knelt a familiar figure: Feng Lung. His face was tight with fear. The sight stabbed Gavin with guilt. It was his fault Feng was in this mess. The thought jolted him out of the clockwork fugue. The world’s minutiae vanished, and he became abruptly aware of his body again. Pain and exhaustion crashed over him. His lungs and legs burned in equal parts.

Alice tried to shout something at Ivana, but she was too out of breath to make more than a squeak. Gavin was equally at a loss.

“Do… something…,” Alice panted.

Gavin aimed one of his wristbands at Ivana and triggered the polaretic magnetized pulsation device he had built only that afternoon. A gear shot from it and flicked straight at Ivana, but they were well over twenty yards away, and by the time the gear crossed the intervening distance, the automaton had swung the iron gates shut and the gear bounced off the bars. Ivana never even noticed. The automaton went to a guard box just inside the gates and stopped moving.

Alice managed a final run up to the gates with her parasol, her loose hair streaming out behind her. For an insane moment, Gavin thought of Joan of Arc attacking an English castle. She reached the gates, grabbed one of the bars with her gauntleted hand, and jumped back with a yelp. Gavin summoned the strength to hurry over.

“An electric field?” he asked.

“I believe so.” She shook out her hand. “Godd- Good heavens, Gavin. It’s our fault. If we hadn’t argued with Feng, he would have stayed with us and… Oh, I don’t know what to do.”

“Peasants do not approach the gate,” the automaton said, coming out of its box. “Peasants go to the rear for deliveries. Remove yourselves!”

Gavin stepped back, partly in surprise and partly to avoid brushing against the electrified gate. “It speaks English?”

“I speak a number of languages, peasant!” said the automaton. “Go around to the back!”

“Who is Ivana Gonta?” Alice asked.

“One of several members of the Gonta-Zalizniak collective family. Do you have a delivery for her?”

“Yes.” She held up her parasol. “Special order.”

“Go around to the back and wait for a proper hour. Your package will be admitted. You will not.”

“It’s not going to let us in,” Gavin murmured. “Can we get over, do you think?”

They both eyed the wall. It was at least eighteen feet high, studded with gargoyles, and likely contained a number of nasty surprises. All they had with them was a broken electrical parasol, a spider gauntlet that cured plague, a glass cutlass, and a set of wristbands Gavin had tested only sporadically. Although the parasol had proven marvelously effective, they had still severely underestimated the power of the local clockworkers. Meanwhile, Feng was inside the place, enduring heaven only knew what. Gavin thought of Charlie’s bare brain and his hands chilled at the thought of his friend Feng in the hands of someone with the intelligence to perform such a procedure and who referred to human beings as meat. He wanted to find a way to storm the gates, flatten the automaton guard, and force Ivana to release Feng, but he couldn’t think of a way to accomplish any of it. He turned helplessly to Alice. She set her mouth.

“We have to leave and come back,” she said firmly. “With more tools and lots of help.”

“The Gontas and Zalizniaks aren’t exactly a family, strictly speaking, strictly speaking,” Harry said. “They are a… collection, really.”

“Collection,” Gavin said. “What does that mean?”

Harry puffed on his cigar and cast a sidelong look at Alice. They were talking in what was euphemistically referred to as the Black Tent, though it was neither black nor a tent. It was actually a boxcar outfitted as a laboratory, with tools hanging on the walls, a portable forge heating up one corner, and half-finished machines littering the tables that lined the walls. It belonged to Dodd, who wasn’t a clockworker but who did have enough of a facility with machines to repair or even build basic clockwork designs, though nothing on the level that Alice could do. It was here that he had tinkered together the windup toys for Gavin and Tom when they were children, visiting the circus with Captain Naismith. The place smelled of machine oil, bitter coal smoke, and metal shavings, and made Gavin think of a time when he was still learning his way around an airship. Dodd called it the Black Tent because the work area had once been a blacksmith’s tent. When the circus became wealthy enough, Dodd had bought a boxcar for everything, but the original name had stuck.

Gavin was feeling restless again, and as happened on the train in Dodd’s car when he guarded Alice’s sleep, his hands went to work without him. A spool of Dr. Clef’s alloy sat in his lap. He wound more of it and snipped rings free of the dowel. He had quite a collection now.

Harry continued to hesitate. Finally Alice spoke up. “If you’re worrying about offending my delicate sensibilities, Mr. Burks, please stop. We don’t have time for nonsense. You must speak plainly.”

The rotund man moved his cigar to the other side of his mouth. “Very well, very well.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t know how much Ukrainian history you know-”

“Maksym Zalizniak was a Cossack who rose up at an outbreak of the clockwork plague,” Alice said crisply. “He used Ivan Gonta and other powerful clockworkers to construct machines of war that forced out the Russians and the Poles-and then the Jews and the Catholics-so they could take back Ukraine and form their own empire. Get on with it.”