The Boneshaker (32 page)

They pushed on among bizarre and ghostly shapes in gloomy cases: flowers that seemed to have been turned to stone, jars of fireflies blinking strange colors, a shimmering miniature of a house that disappeared and reappeared at different angles as they walked past, a live toad and the
ancient rock it was found inside, and pictures made of feathers, and scales, and bones.

Tom was down to his last match when they stopped to carefully draw aside the canvas flap at the back of the tent. They peered out onto the deserted path and up at the silent web above. The moonlit wires seemed to be spun from silver.

"Quiet, now," Tom whispered, "and stick close to the tents."

The second they stepped back into the night, the automata in Natalie's arms began to move. She winced and clutched them closer.

They're trying to give us away,
she realized.
They want the harlequin to find us.

She kept one eye on the wires as she followed Tom and Miranda, thinking perhaps she would see something, a vibration,
anything
that might give some warning of the Amazing Quinn's approach. But they shone still and silent overhead.

"I think the entrance should be right up ahead," Miranda whispered, creeping forward to peer around a corner. "Just up to the—"

Then she backed up frantically, stumbled, and landed in the dirt. "Go!" She hauled herself to her feet and hissed, "
It's coming!
"

They backtracked as quickly as they could. Natalie glanced over her shoulder as they scrambled away; no sign of the little harlequin, no sound to give it away. How far behind was it?

"Where—"

A dark shadow flitted overhead, across the alley they had just left, with the softest jingle of bells. Natalie bit her tongue and brought Miranda and Tom to a quiet halt. Had it heard them?

The shadow stopped dead. Its head swiveled, and the dead white of the porcelain face caught a shaft of moonlight. A soft click as it blinked, the polished surfaces behind the eyeholes disappearing and then reappearing.

No one breathed.

Then the Amazing Quinn gave a short hiss. Its little body shifted on the wires.

"Run!" Natalie screamed.

Hauling Tom between them as best they could, the girls broke into a sprawling race for the nearest pavilion, knocking over placards and easels as they flung themselves inside. Bells overhead jingled. Something dropped onto the canvas roof.

"We can't outrun it," Tom panted. "Not with you dragging me along."

"We can run through the tents. Change direction," Natalie argued. "It doesn't matter if we make it to the road; all we need to do is get out of this fair. We can lose it in the cornfields if we come out the wrong way."

They crept through the pavilion and out the opposite side just as the harlequin swung itself through the entrance. In the open air they ran again, half pulling, half carrying the quietly protesting Tom.

A snarl of fury from inside told them the Amazing Quinn was not happy to find them gone. The second they
heard its bells approaching in the night, they plunged into another tent. Natalie smacked into a pedestal; Tom caught the giant glass light bulb that tumbled from it just in time to keep it from smashing. Miranda untied the flaps at another corner for them to sneak out again.

They hurried through the shadows, then ducked into another pavilion, changed directions, and tiptoed out a different side. There was no further sound different from the Amazing Quinn.

On the other hand, they were now completely lost. There were still booths, pavilions, wagons on all sides. No sign of the entrance, no sign of the open fields that surrounded the lot.

"I think..." Miranda hesitated and turned to survey the dark canvas around them. "Maybe this way?"

At that moment the harlequin dropped to the ground, landing between Natalie and Miranda. Glaring out at them from eyes like ghastly pits under bristly false eyelashes, it hissed again through its pink painted curve of smile.

Miranda screamed and backed away; the harlequin bounded after. Old Tom stepped up to shield her. Natalie took a hesitant step forward, but a warning look from Tom stopped her in her tracks.

The harlequin stopped, too. It tilted its head and stared at Tom, then at Miranda behind him. Then something in its posture changed. It swiveled its head slowly to look at Natalie, black eyes shining behind that expressionless white porcelain face. In her arms the automata shifted, as if they were reaching for Quinn.

She didn't have to be told to run. The harlequin lunged after her.

She sprinted and dodged, not caring which twists and turns she took in the maze of tents. Bells jingled overhead; the harlequin had taken to the wires again.

Her feet kicked up dust and slid on old straw. The things in her arms stirred restlessly. The Amazing Quinn raced alongside and above on a wire parallel to her path. Natalie glanced up, and out of the corner of her eye she saw it pivot and gather itself to jump—just as a break in the tents opened right underneath it. She pitched herself into the little passage. The harlequin sailed just over her head, so close that one of its bells yanked out a few strands of her hair, and tumbled into the dust with a soft crunching sound.

Left again, right and through a tent, another right, left, right ... her ankles hurt from turning in the straw. Somehow, she managed to keep just ahead of the harlequin as it raced through the air on the wires. Every time she thought she must be getting close to a way out of the fair, the Amazing Quinn appeared in her path, forcing her to scramble back the way she'd come. It was hard to hear the soft ringing of the tarnished bells that told her where it was over her own breathing.

She gained a second every time it had to change direction to stay on her trail, and lost four each time she found herself on a path that ran parallel to (or worse, underneath) one of the lines. But they were next to impossible to see in the dark without the harlequin flying along them, at which point it was better not to look.

Just run.
As long as she couldn't
see
it, it couldn't be close enough to jump.

At least, she hoped not.

Abruptly, Natalie realized she couldn't hear the bells anymore. Was that possible? She glanced up again as she ducked around a corner. No shadows above. She slowed, squeezed up against the canvas, and held her breath. Her heart pounded in her ears, her lungs throbbed, but no ghastly bells jingled on the wires.

She couldn't possibly have lost it, could she? There was no way she had outrun it—

From behind her a pair of hands clapped onto her arm and over her mouth and dragged her back through a flap of canvas. Natalie tried to scream.

Miranda's face popped into a sliver of dim light, finger over her lips. "It's us," Tom whispered as he released Natalie. "Where'd the harlequin go?"

"I don't know. I think I lost it."

Miranda shook her head. "I followed it—both of you—for a while, but I lost it a couple of minutes ago not far from here. You came along the same way afterward. It must've stopped following you before that."

Natalie sank to the ground and gulped air. "What now?"

"We're not far from the front, Miranda reckons," Tom said. "We can make a run for it when you catch your breath."

"I'm ready." Her lungs were burning, but if she waited any longer she would have to think about the pain in her legs. She gripped the four automata more tightly. "Let's go."

Miranda peered out and looked up and down the lane. "All clear."

One by one they crept into the night: Miranda navigating, Natalie in the middle with her uncanny burden, and Tom bringing up the rear. Miranda was right; they were back in familiar territory, not far from the Magnetism Tent.

The wires overhead were silent.

"Look!" Tom whispered as they rounded one last corner to find the entrance to the fair only a few yards away. "All we gotta do now is go quick."

The girls saw it at the same time. Natalie grabbed Tom's arm to stop him from ambling out into the open, and Miranda pointed to where a dark shape sat hunched and still like a vulture on a dead branch, balanced on the wire directly over the exit.

"Come on," Miranda said. "We'll cut along the side and go through the field."

Tom shook his head. "Ain't time to be foolin' around anymore. Time's running out. I'll go first, and while he's wastin' his time with me, you two run, fast as you can go."

"So it can attack you instead of us?" Natalie demanded. "It could kill you! We don't know what it might do."

"Anyhow," Miranda said shakily, "if any of us is going to be the distraction, it's got to be somebody who can run."

"Miranda, darlin', the idea ain't that I'm gonna try and get away," Tom said gently. "You and Natalie got to do that part."

Before they could protest any further, the crouching figure straightened, craned its neck, and scurried away, over the wires and out of sight. Natalie squinted in the direction of its gaze and felt as if she had swallowed a stone.

"There." She pointed out toward the road beyond the fair, where four bobbing lights glowed in the fists of four figures walking shoulder to shoulder toward the entrance to the lot. "It wasn't waiting for us. It was waiting for
them.
"

T
HEY CARRIED LAMPS
that illuminated their twisted, angry faces: Acquetus, Vorticelt, Argonault, and Nervine, each looking less like a man and more like a nightmare the closer he got. In Natalie's arms the automaton-doubles thrashed wildly as she, Miranda, and Tom walked out of the fair to stand under the banner at the entrance. From here they could run, perhaps even get away ... but one thing was certain.

There would be no standing up to these creatures.

"Natalie," Tom said, "might be we got only one chance to do this. Got to get it right the first time, or not at all."

Natalie nodded, not daring to look away from the things coming toward them. In her arms the figures struggled more violently. How were they going to sort through all the pieces they'd found out over the last hours, to say nothing of the days since the medicine show had pulled
into Arcane, before the full-size versions of these horrid machines bore down on them?

Pieces.

As Natalie stared ahead, the swinging lamps in the hands of the advancing Four became the sun reflecting off metal chimes as she remembered Simon Coffrett's words for the second time that night.
Some people start with the pieces at the edges, he had said, but if I were you, I'd go straight to the center.
And then, the sibyl:
You must begin at the beginning.

"We've got to go to the crossroads." As soon as she said it, she knew it was true. "That's where we can end it right. We'll fight fire with fire. The Devil started them up; the Devil can shut them down."

Tom nodded. "But you got to go quick, Natalie. Make the Four follow you."

"Me?" She froze, eyes wide. "But ... but you're coming, too, aren't you?"

Now he laughed. "How, darlin'?"

"I'll—I'll go with you," Miranda whispered, worrying the hem of her dress in one shaking hand.

"Ain't time. Ain't time but for one. Natalie, you got to move!"

Natalie whipped her head back and forth.
No, no, no...

"Yes, darlin'. Get on that thing and get going." Tom nodded at the bicycle, leaning where she'd left it against the trough under the shrub. "But you got to make it fly, Natalie. You got to outpace the Devil's boys tonight."

She heard herself protesting and hated it, hated that
she was arguing—but he
knew,
didn't he? Tom had
seen
her try and fail over and over and over! She was thirteen, the daughter of a bicycle mechanic, and she couldn't ride this bicycle. It fought her; it threw her; it hated her.

"Natalie," Tom interrupted, speaking gently but firmly, "you got to race the demons and win, and then you gotta demand to talk to their boss."

His fist opened between them. In his palm the strange coin glinted, uneven edges catching the flickering lantern light.

"Take this and tell him I want my favor, and don't you let him give you any trouble about it. The favor travels with the coin, or it wouldn't have kept turning up again every time I tried to throw it away. But keep a tight hold on it, Natalie. Ain't nothing it would like better than to turn up in my hand just when you need it in yours."

He tipped it into her palm. A sudden cold burned her skin so that she ached to shove it deep into the pocket of her overalls.

"Now you got to, Natalie. You got to try. They're counting on you, everyone." Beside Tom, Miranda stood, wide-eyed, shifting her weight and unable to speak.

The swinging lamps were close enough that they could see clumsy moths bumping around the glass. She could see the grid on Argonault's head, could feel Vorticelt's black-pit eyes searching for purchase on her soul. Natalie ran to the red Chesterlane Eidolon, shoved the automata into the basket on the back of the frame, and buckled it shut. She steadied the bicycle, trapping the Devil's coin between
her left palm and the handlebar.
They're counting on me.

On Limberleg's Chesterlane, she had figured out how to pedal better, and Natalie thought she might even have figured out part of the steering. If she could get up onto the red bicycle, get going, get up some speed ... if she could do that, she might just have a chance. She hadn't figured out how to do any of those things yet, but there was no more time. If she was going to do any good for anybody, she was going to have to get the Chesterlane working for her, boneshaker tendencies and all.

"Go!" Tom yelled, and Natalie was running, racing alongside the bicycle—then throwing one foot at the whirling pedal, missing, stumbling, and picking up speed again.
Remember where thepedals are,
she thought to herself. She ran, kicked off the ground to get her foot on one pedal, swung the other foot—
whoosh
—over the saddle, and suddenly she was churning her feet, pedaling, flying over the dirt road. The bicycle listed, and Natalie leaned away from the tilt. It righted itself effortlessly. Behind her she heard Miranda give a shout of triumph.