Lincoln's Wizard (13 page)

Braxton watched it grow larger as the wagon drew near. A tall barbed wire fence had been erected around the perimeter, allowing Braxton to see the guards patrolling inside with their rifles slung over their shoulders. Dozens of Union prisoners moved about inside the fence, most sitting in groups and talking while the haze of pipe smoke swirled about their heads. None looked underfed or ill-treated, something that eased his mind.

The men in the yard watched him as the wagon approached and passed through the gate. No doubt the arrival of new prisoners was one of the few interesting things that happened to men waiting out the end of the war.

The wagon rattled to a stop in front of a narrow, unadorned door in the wall of the low building. A small squad of armed guards emerged and surrounded the wagon, standing at easy attention, followed by a man in a lieutenant’s uniform.

“New prisoner, sir,” the guard in the wagon said, stepping down and saluting. He handed the lieutenant a sealed letter from his messenger bag, then stepped back.

The lieutenant examined the document thoroughly, then looked up at Braxton.

“Follow me, sir,” he said, then turned and went back inside.

Braxton got gingerly down from the wagon and limped after the Rebel officer. Inside the building, Braxton found himself in a rather large office. Several clerks were busy scribbling on papers and in ledgers at various desks, and there were rows of file cabinets along one wall. The whole place smelled of ink and mildew. The lieutenant passed Braxton’s papers on to a man behind one of the desks who verified Braxton’s particulars in a bored voice before transcribing them into one of the big ledgers.

“This way,” the lieutenant said once this had been completed. He led Braxton to the back of the room and through a door labeled Colonel Jonathan T. Wainwright.

Colonel Wainwright turned out to be a portly man with thinning hair that had gone gray. He rose as they entered and his black eyes swept over Braxton from beneath shaggy brows. The lieutenant handed him the papers, then saluted and left, closing the door as he went.

“Welcome to the Castle Thunder Prison, Captain Wright,” he said. “I am Colonel Wainwright, the officer in charge. My orders say that you are a person of importance to the Confederacy and that I’m to take good care of you. Of course, if you cause trouble, you’ll be taken from this place and sent to Andersonville. I’m sure neither of us want that.”

Braxton suppressed a shiver. Andersonville was bad, if the papers were to be believed, where prisoners slowly starved to death as the Confederacy struggled just to feed them. “No,” he said.

“Excellent,” Wainwright said. “Unfortunately we are a bit overcrowded at the moment, so I don’t have a standard cell for you. Normally I would bunk you in the yard, but every once in a while those men decide to attempt escape by rushing the fence, forcing my men to shoot several of them. Since you are a person of special interest to the Confederacy, I’m going to find other accommodations for you.”

Braxton didn’t know what to say to this, so he thanked the Colonel.

Wainwright rang a small bell that sat on his desk and the lieutenant came back in.

“Take Captain Wright to the mess and see that he’s fed, then escort him to his cell.”

The lieutenant saluted and turned to Braxton. “Follow me, then,” he said.

The mess hall was an open area between the old and new buildings where long tables had been laid out. Most of the men eating were Confederate soldiers who paid Braxton no mind as he sat to eat a meal of some thin stew and corn pone. It wasn’t particularly good, but compared to the alternative of Andersonville, Braxton decided he could wait out the war here very tolerably. He sighed as he thought about just sitting here locked in inactivity. He yearned to be back in the foundries, overseeing the construction of new tall guns, or at his drafting table laboring over a new design, but there was no helping it. Like it or not, he was out of the war.

From there, Braxton was taken to the stone turret. A tall, round top set of double doors stood open flanked by guards. Inside, the turret was open so that Braxton could see all the way to the top. Around the circular walls were cells made of iron bars where men stood crowded nearly on top of one another. The stench of so many packed so tightly was overwhelming and Braxton gagged as it hit him. On the far wall from the doors, another, smaller, opening gave access to a long, stone hallway with doors at regular intervals on either side. As they moved away from the tower the air became less foul. Braxton said a silent prayer of thanks for that.

The lieutenant led him down to the end where the hall turned, then further still, until at last, Braxton found himself looking at a sturdy wooden door bound in iron bands. It was small, as was the opening it covered, with a rusted iron bolt holding it closed.

“We use this for storage,” the lieutenant said, opening the door.

Bodies lay, stacked like cordwood, in the room beyond with arms and legs sticking out at odd angles. The flesh was dark in color, as if the corpses had been burned. Braxton braced himself for the assault of putrefaction to wash over him from the little space, but none came. As he risked breathing through his nose again, all he could smell was … oil.

Braxton saw that the bodies weren’t human. Bits of torn uniforms still clung to some, but the limbs were metal with bulbous brass joints and bent and dented housings. They were Toks, mechanical soldiers built by the Union in an effort to answer the Rebel Grays. Unfortunately, they were too expensive and too complicated to make in significant numbers, and, as was evidenced by the storeroom, they broke easily.

Most of the metal men had been pushed to one side and piled up to make room for a small, wooden pallet that had been laid on the floor. A stool and a covered bucket stood nearby, but there were no other furnishings. A small, barred window let in some light and air, but the room looked dark and stuffy despite it.

“Supper is at six,” the lieutenant said, ushering Braxton inside. “Pound on the door if they forget you.”

Braxton turned and watched the door as the lieutenant’s step could be heard retreating down the hall. There was barely enough space, with all the broken Toks, for the sleeping pallet, and the only clear spot of floor was the space behind the door. For a long moment, he just stood there, taking it all in.

“Well,” he said to the unmoving pile of Toks, “what now?”

Sleep,
his mind coaxed him. It had been a long, tiring trip getting to the prison, and he hadn’t had any proper sleep in days. Still, he was curious about what was outside the window, and the space behind the door simply wasn’t big enough for the amount of pacing Braxton liked to do when he was thinking. There was still plenty of room above the pile of broken Toks. Clearly they had been piled up hurriedly to make room for him. With a little effort, he should be able to pile them higher and create some more floor space.

This thought taking full possession of his mind, Braxton took off his coat and set to work. It didn’t take long for him to realize why his jailers had not simply moved the Toks to the yard, or at least stacked them better. Each Tok had a steel mainspring in its chest that weighed at least one hundred pounds by itself. He quickly resolved to leave the more complete Toks and focus on the ones in multiple pieces. After an hour he had managed to clear several feet of floor in the direction of the window.

Some of the Toks were still dressed in the uniforms the Union put on them in the field, and Braxton kept an eye out for one with a complete shirt to replace his sleeveless one. He found a likely candidate near the bottom of the pile and it took him another hour just to clear enough debris away to examine it closely. As he got closer, the Tok appeared to be fully dressed and in good clothes rather than the shoddy uniforms usually put on Toks.

When he finally got enough of the broken soldiers moved to take a good look at the well-dressed Tok, he let out a cry and fell back on his pallet. This was no Tok! It was a man! A dead man. His face was desiccated and waxy, as if he’d been horribly burned in a fire, with his mouth open, frozen in a silent scream.

Braxton clenched his teeth together as his stomach threatened to return his last meal. Since his only option was to be sick in the void bucket, he resolved to master his stomach, breathing deeply until the feeling passed.

He wondered how a dead man had come to be buried here under a pile of useless machines.

Maybe he tried to escape and got stuck in here?

Braxton tried to imagine the man coming in, maybe hiding under the Toks and getting caught when more of the junk soldiers were brought in. The idea of lying there, trapped and helpless while death from thirst stalked ever nearer, made Braxton sick again.

He took several more deep breaths to calm himself. Whatever had brought this desperate man here, Braxton couldn’t do anything for him now.

Whoever he was, he deserves a Christian burial
.

Braxton felt better having that resolved, and he set to work hauling the remaining Toks.

As he hauled the carcass of a headless Tok off the corpse, Braxton got a better look at the man’s face. He had to struggle not to be sick again. He’d been right about the man having been burned in a fire. His features were twisted and melted as if they’d been made of wax, and he had no ear on one side of his head. With a potent mixture of horror and fascination, Braxton reached out and touched the man’s face. He’d expected it to be brittle, but as he probed, the surface didn’t give at all. Where decay should have weakened his flesh, Braxton found the man’s form solid and unyielding.

He leaned close over the dead man. The skin under his fingers didn’t just look waxy, it
was
wax.

“It
is
a Tok,” Braxton gasped.

The most lifelike Tok he’d ever seen. With the kind of veil that burn victims usually wore, this Tok would have been indistinguishable from a living man. Curiosity burning away his weariness, Braxton hurriedly finished unburying the machine and hauled it out onto his newly created floor space.

With the Tok now free from the debris pile, Braxton could see that it wasn’t just the head that had been specially made. The arm and legs, instead of being straight cylinders, were artfully sculpted to resemble muscles so that, when seen wearing clothes, they would be indistinguishable from flesh. The hands were gloved to cover their obvious construction, but the disguise of a burn victim would allow this Tok to wear gloves at all times without suspicion.

“You beautiful thing,” he whispered aloud. “Who built you, and why?”

Toks served well as soldiers. Their control drums allowed them to do basic things, like march and load and fire a rifle, but one of them could never pass for a living man. For one thing, they couldn’t speak, and for another, they had to be ordered everywhere. Without orders a Tok would simply stand in place until its mainspring wound down.

That was another thing, Toks had to be wound—regularly. The first Toks could only go a few minutes before needing to be wound up. Finally some bright engineer had thought of using a canister of pressurized air to keep the mainspring wound longer. This extended their useful period to several hours, but not beyond. Surely this fake man would be found out the first time he wound down.

“Why would someone build you?” Braxton asked the Tok again. “And how did you end up here?”

“Let’s have a look,” he said after a moment.

The man-Tok wore a suit of sturdy traveling clothes that appeared in good repair except for a burned hole in the front of the shirt. Braxton probed it with his hand and found a ragged opening behind it into the Tok’s chest compartment.

Working carefully, Braxton stripped off the Tok’s coat and shirt to get at its insides. Most Toks had a door in their chests that allowed access to their mainspring and control drums, and for all its individuality, this Tok was no different. The chest plate required a tool to access, a slender piece of metal with a hooked end. Braxton could probably make one, but he’d have to scrounge through the junked Toks to find a suitable metal bit first.

As he sat on his pallet considering this, he heard the sound of footsteps beyond his door and the unmistakable sound of the bolt being pulled back. He cast around quickly for some way to hide the amazing Tok, but it was too heavy to move quickly and he didn’t even have a coat to throw over it.

A heavyset guard with a bushy beard and a bedraggled look pushed the door open only to have it bump against one of the other Toks Braxton had moved.

“Hey,” he said, sticking his head in through the narrow opening. “What goes on here?”

Braxton felt himself blushing and thought quickly.

“Sorry,” he said, trying, unsuccessfully, to push the Tok out of the way of the door. “I was trying to stack these things up better to make more room.”

The guard grunted noncommittally and pushed a wooden bowl in through the opening.

“Supper,” he said.

Braxton took the bowl, willing his hand not to shake, and set it on his pallet. The guard reached into a sack slung over his shoulder and pulled out four balls of fried corn pone which he then handed over as well.

“Thank you,” Braxton said.

“Get this mess cleaned up,” he said, a growl of irritation in his voice.

“Yes sir,” Braxton said. “I will.”

The guard grunted an acknowledgement and closed the door, bolting it behind him.

Braxton sighed with relief and wiped sweat from his brow. The Tok fascinated him, and he was glad the guard had not taken any special note of it. He sat down on his pallet and absently dipped the corn pone in what he suspected was the same thin stew he’d had for lunch. As he chewed absently, he realized that it had gotten darker and the shadows in the cell were lengthening. Nightfall couldn’t be far off. He wanted to work more on the man-Tok but his hand trembled when he raised the corn pone to his mouth. On top of that, his muscles began to protest at the mere thought of lifting more of the heavy Toks.

Newton was right. An object at rest wants to stay at rest.

He chuckled at his joke and finished his stew. There would be time tomorrow for a thorough examination of the strange Tok. After all, neither he, nor it, was going anywhere.