Agatha H. And the Clockwork Princess (11 page)

“Hmf.” DuPree considered stabbing Gil in the eye, then rolled her eyes and told herself that it probably wouldn’t shut him up anyway. “That’s what I’m trying to do.”

They stopped talking as they approached the crowd, attempting to present a united front
¹³
. The crowd had sorted itself into two distinct groups. The first was made up of the audience, who appeared to be trying to hide behind the local Burgermeister. The second comprised the members of the circus, who were doing the same thing behind Master Payne. No one had been foolish enough to run. Of the two obvious leaders, the Circus Master was the most impressive looking, so it wasn’t surprising that he was the one Captain DuPree chose to approach.

She stood for a moment studying his clothing and nodding in approval. It would be hard to slip a knife through all those layers. On the other hand, if she was going to kill the guy in charge, it would be to make a point. In which case, she’d want to be spectacularly flamboyant anyway, so politely slipping a knife between his ribs was already right out. She grinned at the thought. “You look like you think you’re smart. Who’s in charge here?”

Payne looked at Abner. Abner looked back. This appeared to be a trick question, and was most likely just an excuse to use harsher interrogation methods.

“Er… you are.” Payne ventured.

DuPree beamed. “Wow! You’re
so
smart—” her arm snapped out and snagged Abner by the collar, “I’ll have to slap this guy around instead!” Abner rolled his eyes.

Gil cleared his throat. “DuPree—”

Annoyance flitted over the Captain’s face. She tucked Abner’s head into the crook of her arm. ”I’m
working
here,” she said in tone of strained reason. “Do I come to your lab and tell you how to torture rats?”

Gil thought back to last week. “Frequently.”

DuPree nodded. “Yeah! That’s ’cause I know what I’m doing. Now stand back, and let me prove it.” She roughly hauled Abner upright.

“But what do you
want?
” Payne shouted desperately.

DuPree paused. With Gil around, certain tiresome, bureaucratic hoops
did
have to be jumped through. Oh, well. “We’re looking for a girl. Young. Sort of blondie-reddish hair. Healthy. Wears glasses. Caused a lot of trouble on Castle Wulfenbach a few days ago. The Baron wants her.” Abner rolled his eyes imploringly at Master Payne, who shrugged. Bang continued. “Everybody here is going to line up, so we can look them over.”

Payne tried to explain. “But she isn’t here. Besides, I’m only in charge of the circus. The locals won’t—”

“Too many details!” DuPree sang out. “Lesson time!”

She flexed the hand that held Abner and a powerful electrical jolt danced through him. When it cut off, he dropped to the dirt.

DuPree grinned and held up her hand. It was wrapped in a small machine that was still sparking slightly. She touched a dial and waggled her fingers. “This thing is great!” she remarked, grinning sideways at Gil. He angrily snagged her hand and examined it.

“That is a medical device! I made it for you to fix your hand! You aren’t supposed to use it as a
weapon
!”

DuPree laughed and jerked her hand back. “So I
tweaked
it. I like it better this way.” She glanced down at Abner, who was jerkily trying to sit up. “Trust me. If I’d just used my bare hands, he’d be in way worse shape.”

Gil opened his mouth. DuPree cut him off. “Look—Is this the girl?”

“Of course not!”

“Is he dead?”

“I said no one would be
harmed!
”

“If they obey.”

“Give them a
chance
!” Gil shouted.

Abner had shakily climbed to his feet. DuPree put a friendly arm around his shoulders. “Isn’t this always the way?” she asked companionably, one world-weary subordinate to another. “Management thinking it knows what works in the field? This could take all night.” She dropped her voice and spoke sotto voce, “Honest. If I was here alone, and you people were still just standing around, half of you would be dead. Then the rest of us could knock off early!”

“Everybody line up!” Payne roared. The crowd put their heads down and started shuffling into some sort of order when shouting erupted from the far end.

“Oy!”

“Hey!”

“There she goes!”

DuPree grinned. “A-ha! She tried to hide with the villagers and made a break for it!” A shriek filled the night. “—aaand a clank got her! Yeah!”

Conflicting emotions tumbled across Gil’s face. Slowly his hand reached into his coat. “Amazing,” he muttered. “I didn’t believe—”

He froze as a stubby gun barrel pushed up into his jaw. DuPree grinned lazily. “Oh come on now, you’re not going to try anything
stupid
, are you?” Gil’s eyes swiveled downwards trying to identify the type of gun. She continued: “
Your
problem is you’re still thinking ‘fiancée,’ when the word you want is ‘prisoner.’ She won’t like it, but hey—she
obviously
didn’t like ‘fiancée’ much either.”

“Shut up!” Gil snarled as one of the clanks approached. A frantically struggling female figure was tucked under its arm. “Clank! Put her down—gently.”

The mechanical soldier complied. “So what do you have to say about my methods now?” DuPree asked, smug. In the lights the girl stood, held in place by the clank’s grasp. It was Pix.

Gil blinked. “It’s not her,” he said.

“What?” DuPree whipped around and stared at the captive actress in surprise.

Gil continued, enjoying the moment. “
Girl
, yes.
Red-blonde
, yes. Miss Clay? No.”

“She could be in disguise!” But it was obvious that even DuPree didn’t really believe that.

“It’s not her.” Gil repeated.

“But she ran!”

Gil nodded. “Yes, that
is
puzzling. You’d think we were crazy people with guns, battle clanks, and a great big looming airship. What could have
possibly
motivated her—” Gil stopped dead.

Bang looked at him closely. She could tell that he’d seen something. “Oh? What is it, bright boy?”

Gil was staring at Pix’s feet. She was wearing a well-worn pair of sturdy shoes. Shoes he had seen before. “Those shoes belong to the person we’re looking for.” He looked Pix hard in the face. “Where is she?”

Pix stared at Gil. Then a light seemed to dawn and she visibly relaxed. “Oh! The madgirl! Jeez. I was afraid you was just out collectin’ blondes!” She swept a hand through her hair and gave him an appraising sidelong look.

“Yeah, we met her on the road yesterday. She wanted to travel with us, but we knew she was some sort of criminal, ’cause she said she was running from the Baron! We didn’t dare try to catch her, ’cause she had this whonkin’ big gun, ya know?”

Pix dropped her voice conspiratorially. “Now we knew there was something out in the forest, ya know? Something big. So we sent her off that way.” She narrowed her eyes. “Well, she went and
found
it all right, and she drove it right back at us! I guess she was mad ’cause we’d sent her away. But things didn’t work out like she planned, ’cause it turned and grabbed her and completely fried her!” She saw the look on Gil’s face and nodded in satisfaction. “Yeah, she was dead before she knew it, ya know? Like ‘Whoosh!’”

Gil stared at the girl. His mind processed what he had just heard over and over again, trying to find a different meaning to the words. A red haze filled his vision. DuPree looked up at his face and her eyes widened. She stepped back for a better view, a shiver of anticipation running down her spine. This could be entertaining.

All at once, Gilgamesh was looming over Pix, her vacuous, imbecilic face the sole focus of his mounting fury. When he spoke, several people in the crowd jerked to attention. Anyone who had ever heard those harmonics in a madboy’s voice never forgot the experience. “You say she drove a clank straight
at
you. That was a pretty rotten thing to do.”

Pix nodded. If parts of her brain were screaming at her to shut up, the rest of it was apparently too stupid to listen. “Oh, yeah. Well, we’re just lucky our plan worked so well. Who knows what she would have done if we’d let her stay, ya know? Just can’t trust that kind, I always say.” She seemed to realize that she was talking to “that kind” right now. A touch of worry crossed her face, but was quickly wiped away as a sly look took its place. “So… was there a reward?”

No one—not even DuPree, saw Gil’s hand move, but suddenly there was a vicious-looking pistol jammed against Pix’s face. It began to hum as a wheel on the side slowly gathered speed.

“A reward? For sending her to her death? And you’re telling me that she
purposefully
set some kind of monster on a group of helpless people? You’re lying! She would
never
have done that! Where is she?”

Pix looked up into Gil’s face and saw death staring back. She dropped to her knees in fear, but couldn’t bring herself to speak. The pupils of Gil’s eyes almost vanished in his madness. His thumb flicked a toggle on the gun and—

Abner grabbed Gil and tried to swing him about. It was like trying to move an iron statue, but it did have the desired effect of dragging Gil’s attention away from Pix, and fixing it on himself. “Stop!” Abner yelled. “Listen to me! That isn’t what happened!”

DuPree pouted. Things had just been getting interesting. “Hey!” She barked. “Who gave you permission to—”

“Shut up!” Abner didn’t even look at her. He stood glaring at Gil. “Listen!” He insisted.

Without taking his eyes off Abner, Gil shot out his hand and plucked a knife from the air—just before it hit the man’s back. In the same motion, he snapped the knife back at DuPree, where it buried itself in her hat.

“Talk.” Gil’s voice shook.

“These are the Wastelands!” Abner explained. “We have to be wary or we’d be dead! Yes, we met this girl, and yes, she wanted to travel with us, and yes, we sent her away. She scared the hell out of us! But the attack—that clank—it had nothing to do with her. She went off to the east. It came from the north. It just ripped into us, but she came back and stopped it with that damn big gun of hers. She died saving us. Pix here is trying to take credit for something that just happened, because she knows you’re looking for this person and she’s dumb and scared and hoping for a reward!”

DuPree sneered. “Pretty cold, after the girl saved you.”

Abner shrugged. “Yeah? Well, so we’re circus people,” he said flatly. “Grifting is one of the ways we survive. But she did save us, and we buried her like she was one of our own.”

Gil stared. His face was still terrible to look at, but the madness had receded. Now, he was just terribly quiet, but his voice was still dangerous. “I don’t want to believe either of you.” He took a deep breath and studied Abner’s face. “But your story—that—it’s what she would have done. You will show me the place where you say this happened.”

Abner looked worried. “But I… I can’t. It’s way back—” A large set of steel hands closed upon his arms and lifted him from the ground. Gil leaned into his terrified face.

“…and if you’re playing me false, if you people
did
do something to her, I’ll give you to Captain DuPree. Along with everyone else here.”

A small gasp of wonder and delight came from Bangladesh. “Really?” she breathed, “Honest?”

Gil surveyed the crowd. “Every single one of them.” He turned back to Abner. “Unless you tell me otherwise right now.”

Abner looked like a man caught in a trap. “She’s there,” he whispered.

Gil nodded and turned around. At his signal, the clanks snapped to attention, and began to march back to the dirigible.

DuPree sighed and turned to Pix, who stood stupefied, gaping first at the retreating Gil, then at the captive Abner, then back again. She punched the girl’s arm. “Well, you heard the cranky man, we gotta go. Don’t worry, girlie, if your boyfriend here is telling the truth, he’ll be back.”

This seemed to shake Abner free of his shock. “Um… I’m not actually her—” he began.

“Abner!” Pix growled as she grabbed him by the lapels. “Shut up!” She kissed him fiercely before spinning away. She only took two steps before she spun about again. Tears were in her eyes, but her voice was steady. “You’d better come back in one piece,” she threatened, “Or I’ll find you, you idiot! Don’t forget!”

Abner blinked in astonishment, but he shut up.

Less then two minutes later, the airship was moving off, its engines roaring. The audience members were vanishing fast—casting nervous glances at the circus and the sky as they went.

Payne grabbed the closest of the performers—a handsome, dark-haired young man in his mid-twenties. “Lars, pass the word—quietly. I want us packed and on the road in ten minutes.”

Lars looked shocked. “But it’s dark! And we’re paid up here for the next two days!”

Others who had heard this exchange started to join in, but Payne cut them off. “I want us gone before the townies realize that we brought that airship here.”

The implications of this sank in. Herr Rasmussin
¹⁴
nodded briskly, reached into his coat, and with a snap, unfolded his dance-master’s cane. “Jig time!” he called out urgently. Everyone groaned.

The old campsite by the river was quiet now. The heaps of clank parts had cooled where they fell. The places where the earth had been torn showed raw, the grass still trampled. Where trees had snapped, the wounds were still bright yellow and oozing sap.

The main body of the crab clank was recognizable, but the interior had been almost completely burned and fused. The legs of the clank had managed to fall in an almost artistic pattern, so the modest mound of the grave lay within an encircling corral of red enameled metal. A small sapling had been planted on the mound, and leaning against it was a strange-looking gun, obviously broken. Gil stood silently for several minutes, fingering one of the tree’s bright green leaves.

Abner fretted. Finally, he could take it no longer. He had to say something. “That’s… the tree is something… One of the girls… that’s what they do in her village when someone dies. We didn’t know what your… um, what she would have liked.”