The Havoc Machine

Chapter Nine

Thad pulled on fresh trousers, then looked at himself in the full-length mirror inside the door of the wardrobe in his wagon. Atop it was his bed, the one his parents used to sleep in and which he now used. Beside him on the wall hung his collection of clockwork trophies. They seemed forlorn now instead of menacing. The blank eyes of one of the automaton heads looked more reproachful than glassy. Maybe it was time to take them down. Beneath them, the fold-down shelf Sofiya had put him on was still piled up with dirty quilts. He had slept on that shelf as a very small boy, though in later years his parents had acquired a tent that draped over the front of the wagon to effectively double the living space, and Thad had slept on a camp bed out there.

His hair was still damp from the bath, and he had even managed a shave. He was reaching for a fresh shirt when he caught his reflection in the mirror inside the wardrobe door. The brass hand gleamed at the end of his wrist. It looked strange against his bare skin. Cautiously, he held it up. In the mirror, his reflection did the same. Thad had a long, lean build, and his muscles were tightly corded, every one etched with acrobatic precision. The hand, in contrast, was spiky and uneven. The cogs spun smoothly, but they showed through, pulling on the wires that served as tendons. He ran a finger down his forearm, feeling the normal slide of his fingertip on his skin, until he met metal a few inches below where his wrist had been, and the sensation ended. He rapped on the hand with a knuckle. That he felt, more or less, though it could have just been vibrations transmitted to his wrist. Impulsively, he stuck a metal finger in the candlestick burning on the nearby table. At first he felt nothing. Then a rising heat came, and actual pain. He snatched his finger back, but the metal didn’t cool down quickly. Hissing through his teeth, he plunged the finger into the water pitcher. A faint psst rose from the liquid. The pain stopped.

“Sharpe is sharp,” said Dante. “Bad boy, bad boy.” He was chinning himself upside down on a perch cobbled together from a pair of oaken ax handles and hung from the ceiling. The handles had deep beak marks all over them. Thad would have to build a new one soon. He was privately certain that if he left Dante alone with a block of marble, he would return to find a pile of stone chips and a cheerful parrot.

“You are asking for trouble, birdbrain.” Thad shook the water from his hand, and the fingers clattered together like Dante’s dented feathers. There was still a delay between the time he wanted his hand to do something and the time it obeyed. He held it up one more time, turning it this way and that. It was better than losing a hand entirely, but…he had lost a hand. He couldn’t throw knives with it, swallow swords, or perform sleight of hand. He was a cripple. Half a man.

Stop it, he told himself. Many people go through much worse. You just need practice. You’re fine.

He didn’t feel fine.

“Doom,” said Dante from his perch.

“Shut it!” Thad snapped at the parrot’s reflection in the mirror. Then Thad paused. Something was off. He pulled open the other half of the wardrobe. Instead of his collection of weapons, he found more clothing. Women’s clothing-dresses and skirts and petticoats and blouses. Below them were folded a small stack of ragged shirts which looked to fit a small boy. For a terrible moment of hope, Ekaterina and David were alive again, their clothes in the wardrobe where they belonged. Then the thought fled. Sofiya must have put these here, and she had moved his weapons to do so. Annoyed, Thad flicked through the hanging articles. One of them felt heavy in the wrong place. Curious, he felt around. From the pocket of one skirt, he drew a photograph in a small frame. It was of a young woman, quite pretty, with long hair and wearing a pale dress. The family resemblance to Sofiya was unmistakable. The woman was sitting next to a spindly table that held a vase with flowers in it. It took Thad a moment to realize that the woman’s chair had wheels, and that only one shoe peeped out from under her skirts. She was missing a leg.

Thad examined the picture more closely. Sofiya had mentioned her sister Olenka as a survivor of the clockwork plague, and the plague often crippled survivors, though as far as Thad knew, it twisted or paralyzed limbs. It didn’t cause them to fall off, except in people who became zombies. Perhaps an overeager physician had decided to amputate. In any case, it explained some of Sofiya’s reluctance to talk about her sister.

He slipped the photograph back into its place, pulled out one of his own shirts, and shook it out. Where had she put his weapons? It bothered him a great deal that she had not only touched them, but moved them where he couldn’t find them.

“Dammit, Sofiya!” he muttered.

“Yes?” she said behind him.

He dropped the shirt and spun around, automatically snapping out his hands for his knives, but the brass one fumbled, and the spring-loaded sheaths weren’t fitted to his forearms in any case. He got himself back under control.

“That’s a good way to get killed,” he growled, pointing a metal finger at her collarbone.

“That day will come later. You did promise,” she said. “What did you want?”

“Where did you put my blades?”

“In the Black Tent. Dodd gave me permission to store them there for now so Nikolai would not injure himself. You may retrieve them anytime you like.”

“And these are yours, then.” He gestured sharply at the clothes in the wardrobe.

She cocked her head. “Did you want to borrow something?”

“Not my color,” he replied, refusing to be baited. “Why are they here?”

“For three and a half days I could not leave you alone,” she pointed out. “Where else would I put my things? Nikolai needs something besides borrowed rags to wear, by the way. We are taking him shopping later.”

“We?”

“I have no wish to do this by myself. He is also your responsibility, so you will come to buy clothes.”

“Nikolai is an automaton!” Thad said. “What does he need with clothes?”

Sofiya put her hands on her hips. “He hauled us both onto the train as it was pulling away, but you begrudge him clothing? What sort of man are you?”

He gave up. “All right, all right. We’ll buy him clothes.” Thad held up his hands. “It looks bad for the circus if he’s wandering around like a beggar anyway.”

“Good.”

“And then we hunt down Mr. Griffin.” Thad turned his brass hand in the light. “I won’t let him run loose after everything he’s done.”

“Oh yes? And how do you propose to begin this hunt?”

“Any number of ways.” Thad folded down fingers on his flesh-and-blood hand. “Make enquiries at machine shops and metal forges, search the city for his spiders and follow them, check abandoned buildings-”

“Ah. And once he learns you search for him, he sends his army of spiders to tear the circus to pieces. Or perhaps just dismantle a few people while you watch. Very good planning. I like it.”

Thad fell silent. Sofiya was right, though he hated to admit it. There had to be a way around the problem. Griffin could not go free.

“While you are planning this hunt,” Sofiya continued, “we should also speak with a tentmaker about adding on to this wagon like I have seen some of the other performers do. Three people can live in here, but it is crowded.”

“Now look,” Thad began. “You can’t stay-”

“And where else would I go? I can’t leave the circus. I am performing for the tsar in a few days, and Mr. Griffin will be looking for me-for us-eventually, so it would be awkward to move into a boardinghouse or hotel, what with spiders and things crawling after me. I will stay here.” She patted his cheek. “Do not worry, little one. Your virtue is safe. Though I have to say, you are doing a fine job of tempting me.”

For the first time, Thad remembered he wasn’t wearing a shirt. He snatched his from the floor with a yelp and yanked it on. Sofiya covered her eyes with mock horror. “Oh me! I will go blind!”

“Pretty boy, pretty boy!” Dante chinned himself on the perch. “Sharpe is sharp!”

Thad turned his back to do up the buttons, but his new hand wouldn’t do the fine motions. He made a frustrated noise.

“Let me.” Sofiya spun him around and finished the job before he could protest.

“Thank you,” he said grudgingly. “Look, you can’t stay in my wagon. People will talk. We’ll get you a wagon or tent of your own.”

“You think the two of us together will shock your friends?” Sofiya laughed. “Mama Berloni was divorced before she married Papa Berloni. Mordovo takes morphine when he isn’t sipping laudanum or drinking. And your ringmaster is all but married to his manager. I think everyone will find our living arrangements rather tame.”

“Mama Berloni left her husband because he beat her and their daughter,” Thad replied sharply. “Mordovo was in an accident several years ago, so he takes the drugs to dull the pain. And Dodd and Nathan are good men who will give a beggar the last coins in their pockets.”

“While we are flung together because of a dreadful clockworker who holds our loved ones hostage,” Sofiya added, “and because we are looking after a little automaton who fell into our laps. Honestly, no one cares what we do, Thad. Not here. You would know that if you spent more time out there instead of brooding in here.” Her tone lightened. “And there is no worry about the sleeping arrangements. Clockworkers sleep almost never and Nikolai sleeps not at all, so you may have the bed all to yourself.”

“Yes, fine.” Feeling out of sorts, Thad gestured for her to turn her back so he could finish dressing, and she obeyed with a shrug. “So what do you do all night, if you don’t sleep?”

“Dodd has said I can use the Black Tent.”

Thad twisted his head to look at her, though all he could see was a waterfall of golden curls spilling over the crimson cloak. “He let you in there?”

“Sometimes I must adjust Kalvis. His Black Tent has good tools for it, so he gave permission to use it as long as he is not there. I persuaded him.”

“Persuaded or bullied?”

“Is there a difference?”

Thad adjusted his braces and reached for his jacket. He also took the precaution of pulling on a thin pair of leather gloves. No point in calling attention to his new hand if he didn’t need to. “At any rate, what exactly are you doing in there?”

“Building.” She turned around and held out her hands. “Sometimes the madness comes on me, and I must build. The destruction of your hand brought the madness on me, fortunately for you. And it was good that Mr. Griffin had his own reasons for allowing it.”

“Hm,” was all Thad could say. The hatred for Mr. Griffin smoldered like a crust of ash over lava. He held out his arm, and Dante hopped onto his shoulder.

“Now that you are fully dressed,” Sofiya said, “we will shop. Bring money.”

After some searching, they found Nikolai in the very Black Tent they had been discussing. The Black Tent wasn’t actually black, nor was it even a tent. It was instead one of the boxcars attached to the train. The main door had been slid open, and sounds of someone hammering on metal came from inside. An unlit forge sat outside next to an anvil. Thad poked his head into the car. Tools of all shapes and sizes hung on the walls. Worktables sat beneath, and they were littered with small machines and machine parts-cogs and keys and memory wheels and small axles and iron bolts and copper plating and more. Dodd was punching holes in a bit of brass. Next to him on the wooden table were two identical toy dogs, both half finished. Nikolai stood on a footstool, his eyes on Dodd’s hands.

Originally the Black Tent had indeed been a blacksmith’s tent-hence the name-and it had always been pitched far away from the rest of the circus for fear of fire. Later, the Kalakos Circus had become successful enough to buy a boxcar for its metalworking, but the original name had stuck. Dodd was a tinker, a very good one, who could create clockwork toys and perform minor repairs. He could not, however, create anything like the machine at the end of Thad’s wrist or the rag-wrapped boy who stood by the tabletop, watching him work.

Dodd, Thad happened to know, had once been a chimney sweep’s apprentice, which meant he was an orphan boy the sweep had bought from the church and forced into slave labor, crawling into claustrophobically narrow chimneys to scrub them clean. Eventually he had run away from his master over events he still refused to speak about. Thad suspected he had become a second-story thief; climbing boys were experts at scaling bricks and getting into small spaces. At some point, Dodd had tried to steal from Victor Kalakos, but instead of turning the boy over the to the police, Victor had taken him on as an apprentice. Several years later, when Kalakos died without an heir, it seemed perfectly natural for Dodd to step into his shoes, even though his last name wasn’t Kalakos. Indeed, Thad didn’t know if Dodd even had a last name.

Thad had no idea how Dodd and Nathan had met, nor did he care to ask.

Dodd finished the holes on the metal plate, fitted it onto one of the dogs, and used a squeezer to pop the rivets that held it in place.

“There,” Dodd said. “Now you.”

Nikolai picked up the hammer and the punch, studied them them for a moment, and looked at a second piece of brass on the worktable. Thad heard the tiny whirring sound of memory wheels. In rapid-fire succession, Nikolai punched perfectly even holes around the edge of his bit of brass. His hands moved so quickly, Thad could barely follow them. Then he popped the piece into place and squeezed every rivet into place with mechanical precision. The entire operation took only a few seconds.

“Bless my soul!” Dante squawked.

“Oi!” Thad said, climbing the short staircase into the Black Tent. “What are you blackguards up to, then?”

“It’s fun!” Nikolai brandished the squeezer. His scarf had fallen away, creating a sharp contrast between his boyish demeanor and his half-mechanical face.

“Your…automaton has an interesting function,” Dodd said. “He learns quickly. Instantaneously, really. I’m not sure how, but he does.”

“It’s fun,” Nikolai repeated.

“Don’t let him get in the way,” Thad said. “If he bothers you, send him away.”

“Not at all. I enjoy his company.” Dodd picked up one of the dogs and wound it with a key. The dog strutted mechanically round the worktable, paused, sat, and sprang into a backflip. Nikolai wound his own dog, which did the same thing. “It’s nice to have the money to tinker again. I haven’t made anything in months and months. I do miss my spiders, though.”

Sofiya was staring about the Black Tent with a haunted look on her face. “Would you like them back again?”

Before Dodd could respond, Thad jumped in. “We’ve come to take Nikolai off. He needs clothes.”

Nikolai whirred again. “I don’t want to go.”

“Applesauce,” Dante muttered.

“What?” Thad said.

“I don’t want to go,” Nikolai repeated firmly. “I want to stay here with Dodd.”

Confused, Thad traded looks with Sofiya. Nikolai had never refused a command before. “We could go later, I suppose,” Thad said slowly.

“No!” Nikolai’s eyes flickered. “That’s not right.”

“Sorry?”

“You’re the papa. You have to make me go, even if I don’t want to. It builds character.”

Sofiya clapped a hand over her mouth. Dodd’s expression went carefully wooden.

“Ah,” said Thad. “And I suppose you’re going to complain the entire time we’re out.”

He jumped down from the stool. “Yes.”

“Doom,” said Dante.

* * *

They crossed the Field of Mars and the heavily trafficked street that ran along it to the long, elaborate barrack, in front of which waited a line of izvostchik, the little roofless carriages that provided for-hire transportation. At the forefront of each sat a man in a padded blue coat bound with a sash or heavy belt, and a flat-topped, black hat. All the men wore bushy beards, each combed and elaborately styled. The coats and the beards combined to make the men look big enough to haul the carriages without the help of a horse, and fierce enough to try.

“Vanka!” Sofiya called. “I wish to shop at Peter’s Square!”

The izvostchik drivers turned as one and began shouting in Russian.

“My cab is the finest in the city, lady! I will take you everywhere you-”

“He is a fool! My cab is much more comfortable, and the fastest in-”

“My cab! My cab! No smoother ride in town!”

“I know every merchant and seller, lady, and I can find you the best prices!”

“You.” Sofiya pointed to one of the drivers. “Perhaps you, Vanka. But also perhaps not. Your cab is shabby and your horse is old. How could I ride with you?”

“You wound me!” The driver slapped his chest. “Every day I oil the wheels and check the springs. My horse is young and quick! And you can see I am strong and handsome, just for the lady.”

“I see mud on your fenders, Vanka,” Sofiya pointed out. “If I ride with you, I will become dirty.”

“He is dirty, too!” called out another driver. “He will take you to unsavory parts of town. My cab is the cleanest in the city.”

“Saint Petersburg is muddy, alas,” agreed the driver. “But I have special lap robes to protect the lady’s beautiful cloak.”

This went on for considerable time. Eventually, Sofiya begrudgingly agreed to hire the driver with the lap robes and they settled on a price that seemed to Thad scandalously low, but he kept his mouth shut and boosted Nikolai aboard the cab while the other drivers continued to call out hopeful last-minute pleas and insults.

“Is it always like that?” Thad asked as Vanka guided the horse away from the curb. Other traffic-carriages, cabs, spiders, automatons, and horses-swirled around them. The horses churned up a steady stream of dirt, and Thad was glad for the lap robes the driver had provided to keep their clothes clean.

“It is a game,” Sofiya said in English. “Vanka-all the drivers are called that-would be disappointed if we didn’t argue with him. You should see them in winter. They wrap themselves in furs to keep warm, and they look like Siberian bears. If you like him and want to hire him again, you must remember what his beard looks like. All the Vankas comb their beards differently so you can tell them apart.”

Vanka cracked his whip, and the carriage shot forward. It careened through traffic, dodging around larger carriages and team-hauled lorries. Nikolai wrapped his arms around Thad’s waist with silent strength.

“Applesauce! Applesauce! Doom!” Dante clung to the back of the carriage and bobbed up and down with excitement. Further conversation was impossible. Thad bounced about the back, and found himself pushing against Sofiya. Half the time she was in his lap, and he found himself noticing how soft she was and how long it had been since he had felt anything like it. He gave himself a mental shake. Sofiya was not someone with whom he wanted to create a romantic relationship.

But his treacherous mind sketched out scenarios anyway. Nikolai had already declared that the three of them were a family, and in a strange way, they were. What would it be like to be…involved with Sofiya? She was beautiful and intelligent and skilled. He flexed his new hand inside its glove, feeling a strange mixture of gratitude for what she had done and aversion to what was she was. The carriage dashed in a razor-straight line down the street as Thad’s mind flicked ahead and saw the three of them living at the circus, performing afternoons and evenings. Afterward, the three of them would gather in the wagon with a new tent spread over the front. Nikolai would read his book and Thad would sharpen his blades and Sofiya would work on-

Idiocy. Even if he were interested, Sofiya was a clockworker. Within three years, she would go insane, and Thad had promised to kill her when that happened. Wouldn’t that be a fine thing for a papa to do?

Vanka barreled around another corner and hauled up short at a large square where a noisy open-air market spread out like a quilt beneath the cloudy autumn sky. No sellers had booths. Some used farm wagons, many walked about with baskets, and some spread their wares out on the ground. A box seller’s boy wearing a long coat four sizes too big for him trudged past with piles of empty boxes strapped to his back. A chimney sweep in a high hat brandished his blackened broom to let people know he was for hire. A farmer stood next to a wheelbarrow heaped with potatoes while a boy waved at people to examine the bright-beaded abacuses spread out on his blanket. A spider with an enormous bowl of sweets on its back wandered about the crowd, accepting small coins in a slot on its back and handing out treats in return. Smells of food, of cooking apples and frying potatoes and baked fish, clashed with smells of unwashed people and raw sewage and rotting garbage.

Here Thad felt on firmer ground. This market was exactly the same as the ones in Romania and Poland and Ukraine and Lithuania. Sofiya poked Thad and jerked her head at the driver. Thad fumbled with his new hand until he could force it to extract some coins from his pocket for Vanka, who grinned within his carefully combed beard when he saw they were rather more than the sum Sofiya had haggled.

“I will wait for you, my lord,” he said, and crossed his arms, ready to do just that.

Sofiya tsked at Thad. “You aren’t supposed to pay them extra. They lose respect for you.”

“He can tell his children how he bested the foolish foreigner over an extra piece of bread tonight,” Thad said, holding out his arm so Dante could jump aboard. “Come along, Nikolai. Stay close.”

“Yes, pa-”

“Don’t,” Thad admonished. “Just don’t.”

Nikolai made a sound very much like a sigh from inside his scarf and Sofiya gave Thad a hard look.

“Where should go, then? I assume you know this market,” Thad said.

Although Thad’s command of Russian was perfectly up to the task, he let Sofiya take the lead, content to let her search for already-made clothing that would fit Nikolai, and haggle over the price while he paid and carried. Sofiya didn’t even bother to have Nikolai try anything on, but instead held shirts or trousers up to him to check color, and Thad remembered that most clockworkers could measure by eye with perfect accuracy. It had never occurred to him that such a skill might come in handy in a textile context.

Contrary to his earlier threat, Nikolai didn’t complain. For his part, he stood patiently while Sofiya checked this or that, though his large eyes seemed to devour everything around him. Thad wondered what his earliest memory was. Looking up at the ceiling of a laboratory? Or into Havoc’s face? Perhaps Havoc implanted memories into him. It would theoretically be possible to remove any or all of Nikolai’s memories by just changing or removing his wheels. And how would that change Nikolai? Thad found he didn’t like the idea.

Sofiya bought a basket to carry things in and handed it to Thad along with a shirt for the growing pile. She was choosing the peasant style popular for boys and men-blousy shirts and trousers, a pair of calf-length boots to tuck them in, a furry cap, a long coat. The shopping itself was turning out rather pleasant, as if the three of them were out on a family-

No. They weren’t a family. Circumstances had forced them together, and one day circumstances would cut them apart. That didn’t make them a family. And Thad didn’t like the fact that Mr. Griffin, a clockworker as ruthless as they came, was running about in Saint Petersburg. Thad’s back itched, and he glanced around the market, looking for Mr. Griffin’s spiders despite Sofiya’s warning. Any moment, he would make a demand of them by threatening the circus and Sofiya’s sister and perhaps even Nikolai. It was living with a sword hanging over his head. His wrist ached. Once they got back to the circus, he would have to start tracking Mr. Griffin down, but carefully. Trouble was, he was at a severe disadvantage. Several disadvantages. His mechanical hand was still new to him. Thad didn’t know Saint Petersburg at all, and he had no friends here. Mr. Griffin had to be aware Thad would be trying to kill him, so there was no element of surprise. Every person in the circus was a hostage to Mr. Griffin’s spiders. The more Thad thought about it, the more impossible it seemed.

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.”

“He does everything you do and listens to everything you say.” Sofiya straightened her skirts and cloak and produced a handkerchief. “You know this.”

“Are you all right, Nikolai?” Thad asked.

“I’m all right,” he said. “They didn’t hurt me, but I think they would have. They said you had left the market and sent them to take me home.”

“Why didn’t you fight them like you did that boy?”

Nikolai shrugged. “I didn’t know how until now.”

Thad got to his feet. The alley swayed for a moment, and he braced himself against the wall until it settled down. The men who had attacked them didn’t move, though the boy still moaned softly. Thad took their knives away and examined them. Even in the dim light of the alley, he could see they were dull and of poor workmanship. A poor man’s tool, not even worth throwing away.

“What do we do with them?” he asked. “I’ve half a mind to saw their hands off.”

“Certainly not.” Sofiya was using the handkerchief to wipe muck off Nikolai’s face. “We will give them money and let them go.”

He stared at her. “Are you insane?” he blurted, and then, flushing, wished he could take the final word back.

“The famed clockwork madness has not begun for me yet.” She calmly put her handkerchief away without offering it to Thad, probably because it wouldn’t have done any good, then sprinkled a few coins over the men like a fairy godmother dropping golden tears on sleeping children. “We must go now. Don’t forget Dante.”

The wet, sewage-ridden muck was soaking through Thad’s gloves. He peeled them off, tossed them away, and gingerly plucked Dante from the alley floor. This time Sofiya offered up a handkerchief to wrap him in. They trudged back in the direction from which they had come, making sure Nikolai walked where they could see him. Nikolai stayed close, in any case.

“Look around you, Thad,” Sofiya said before he could ask about the money again. “This is how most of the people in Saint Petersburg live.”

She pulled them into a muddy street that was only slightly wider than the alley. Rickety buildings with ill-fitting doors and shutters leaned drunkenly over the byway. Men in ragged peasant clothing mingled with women in dirty head cloths. Children who had never seen a bath and whose clothes could barely be called clothing appeared to be playing in the street, but when Thad looked closer, he realized they were scavenging through the garbage and offal. The thick smell of human waste was omnipresent. People stared at the trio and their rich clothing as they passed, and they were quickly surrounded by children begging for coins. Thad kept a tight grip on his money.

“I will work for you, my lady,” said a boy. “Whatever you say. I will carry for you and sweep the street for you. Half a kopeck!”

“I will lie with you for two kopecks, my lord,” said a girl who wasn’t more than ten. “Even one and a half!”

Thad threw a handful of coins into the street, and the children bolted for them while he, Sofiya, and Nikolai hurried away past more hungry eyes that watched from doors and windows. Here there were no shops, no storekeepers, nothing to buy or sell but labor and human flesh itself, and all of it far too inexpensive. Thad heard shuffling. A small pack of plague zombies, the first ones he’d seen since leaving Vilnius, shambled through shadows near the mouth of an alley, avoiding the light. They were naked, not even a rag to cover themselves. Their hair hung in filthy strings, and their flesh was already rotting away from their bones as the plague ate its way through their bodies. Thad shied away automatically, and hoped they would die soon, partly so they stop spreading the plague and partly out of simple mercy. There was nothing to do for them, no way to cure them, no method of giving them comfort without risking contraction of the disease. Even putting a bullet through a zombie’s brain spread the plague in a spray of ichor and blood. The folk on the street knew it, too, and like Thad, they shied away from the alley.

“All these people are slaves, you know,” Sofiya said. “The landowners call them serfs and pretend that means they are attached to the land instead of its owners, but it is all the same. The people of this class must do as the landowners of the court bid them. The men and boys are conscripted into the army, sometimes for life with no pay. If the landowner or the tsar wishes something to be built or repaired, they conscript these people and work them to death. When Peter the Great”-she spat-“decided to build a city in a swamp and name it after himself, he brought in over a hundred thousand peasants, worked them until they died, and then brought in more.”

Her jaw trembled and her eyes were bright. Thad felt uncomfortable and didn’t know how to respond, so he remained silent.

“This is what most of Saint Petersburg is like,” Sofiya said, her mouth a hard line. “This is where my father lived when he came to the city to look for work. There are no doctors, no schools, no police. But when they find work in a house as a servant or a bedwarmer, the tax collector is there to ensure that the tsar and the landowner receive their share. It is no wonder those men took Nikolai. He represents more money than anyone here would earn in a hundred lifetimes. The money I gave them will feed their families for a month.”

“I’ve seen poverty,” Thad said. “Warsaw has quite a lot of it. And there were lean times for us before David-” His throat thickened unexpectedly at the mention of his son’s name, and Thad realized he was feeling shaky. Everything that had just happened came back at him with a rush, and he wanted very much to sit down, but there was nowhere to sit. Nikolai looked up at him, and Thad touched his shoulder with his free hand, feeling a wash of relief. All right. This wasn’t Warsaw. Nikolai wasn’t David. And anyway, Nikolai was a machine. His disappearance was simple theft, not kidnapping.

He finished, “There were lean times back when I owned a shop.”

“Then you understand,” Sofiya said.

“I understand,” Thad agreed. “I don’t sympathize, but I understand.”

They found their way back to the market and to Vanka, their driver, who was still dozing in his cab. Sofiya coughed loudly and he shot awake, then recoiled at the sight of them.

“You should never wrestle with a pig,” he observed gravely. “Even if you win, you lose.”

“We wish next to go to a bath house,” Sofiya said. “But first you must fetch our parcels from the hat seller over there.”

“You might also buy an old blanket from the rag man,” Thad added, “so we do not soil your magnificent cab.”

“I’m hungry,” said Nikolai.