The Impossible Cube: A Novel of the Clockwork Empire (21 page)

Click only purred as Dr. Clef’s joyful laughter poured out of the shanty.

K
iev was the opposite of Luxembourg. Funny how two places could be populated with human beings but be so completely different, Gavin mused as the train puffed and growled through town. Although the city was built on a series of seven hills with a winding river at the bottom of the valley, the place had no greenery in it whatsoever. Not one tree, flower, or blade of grass grew anywhere. Stone and steel, smoke and sludge hemmed Gavin in. Street after street of blocky buildings crouched low over cobblestoned streets. Gargoyles clung to rooftops and intricately carved monsters crawled across archways. Forests of chimneys belched out clouds of smoke or flashed plumes of yellow flame. Pipes urinated endless streams of waste into the river. A crowd of workers huddled outside a factory, hoping to be called in for a job. More people moved up and down crowded sidewalks. The men wore gray shirts, and the women wore brown dresses and head cloths, and they kept their heads
down as they walked. Bright colors seemed to have been outlawed, and the lack pulled Gavin’s spirits lower and lower with every passing moment. Something else bothered him about the crowds, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

Mechanicals ruled the streets. Skittering spiders and brass horses and hovering whirligigs clogged the pavement and the air above it. Automatic streetcars rattled down their tracks, drawing iron boundaries behind them. They all pumped out steam and coal smoke, turning the air thick with white mist and yellow sulfur. Gavin turned away from the window with a feeling of nausea. The something he couldn’t figure out continued to bother him, and it gave him a slight headache.

“How can people live here?” he said.

“People live in all kinds of places,” Dodd said philosophically from his own chair near the table. “Many of them can’t go anywhere else. My usual thought is to be grateful I don’t have to stay.”

Gavin thought of his ship, his graceful
Lady
, now being hauled inexorably into this stony trap by an iron demon, and wondered how grateful he should be. He sighed. Once Alice had finished distributing the cure here, and once they were reasonably safe beyond the reach of Phipps, they could reassemble the
Lady
and fly for the Orient. As it was, he felt restless and out of sorts after days of inactivity. They had arrived in Berlin to find reward placards with Gavin’s likeness on them plastered over nearly every empty surface and a notice about him that circulated daily in every local newspaper. Alice, who hadn’t been with the Third Ward long enough to be photographed, had escaped such treatment,
but her description had been bandied about, as was Feng’s. This forced Gavin to stay hidden either aboard the
Lady
or in Dodd’s car during the circus’s entire time in Berlin. Alice and Feng risked slipping out to spread the cure around and brought back reports that underground stories of a woman with a demon’s hand and a man with an angel’s voice were already circulating. A number of Alice’s “patients” asked Feng to sing, and he quickly demurred.

“When I sing,” Feng said, “donkeys die in the street.” So one night Gavin spent an hour with the little nightingale, recording the same song over and over until he was satisfied he’d done it perfectly. He gave it to Feng so he could play it for Alice on her nightly missions. But some time later, the nightingale came fluttering back to him. His careful music was gone, and the nightingale instead spoke in Feng’s voice.

“The lady wants you to know that the nightingale’s music is pretty, but not the same as yours,” it said, “and it makes her sad to hear it.”

More than once, Feng himself happily remained behind to accept from a grateful cure recipient what he called “additional gratuity,” a practice that infuriated Alice and Gavin both—Alice on moral grounds and Gavin because it meant Alice was forced to travel back to the circus unescorted through Berlin streets. Feng, however, seemed unfazed by their fury, and Gavin understood more fully why Feng’s father had decided not to allow him to continue as a diplomat in England.

When Alice returned from these midnight excursions, she collapsed into a deep sleep that lasted long enough to make Gavin nervous. He spent hours sitting
by her bunk, just to be near her. The iron spider on her arm lay between them, glaring red and bubbling with blood. He barely got to speak with Alice, hardly even saw her awake. This mission to cure the world drove her to exhaustion, and while he couldn’t fault her for it, he found himself wishing she would give up some of her intensity. Leaving London and Alice’s fiancé behind was supposed to have granted them the freedom to love each other, but instead they found even less time for each other than before. How could Gavin compete with a world of plague victims? At times he wanted to shake her and shout that he was dying, that any day his life could end, and she would have all the time she wanted to spread the cure. But he didn’t. The devotion and intensity made Alice herself, and changing any of it would make her into a different person, someone he wouldn’t want to spend his remaining time with. He could either love her or change her, but not both.

Dr. Clef didn’t seem to share Gavin’s unhappiness. He stayed locked up in the ship’s laboratory, scribbling with pencil on endless sheets of paper or with chalk on a slate, and manipulating long sections of his alloy into odd shapes. Gavin had been afraid that he was trying to re-create his Impossible Cube, but Dr. Clef waved this idea aside.

“It is as I told you,” he said blandly. “I cannot re-create it, now or ever.” But he would not say what he was working on.

As time passed, Gavin took to spending more and more time in Dodd’s car. It was larger and more
comfortable than any stateroom on Gavin’s ship, and Dodd seemed glad to have him, his sole connection to Felix Naismith, though they never spoke of the man.

Enforced idleness didn’t sit well with Gavin, and his hands worked without him. Even now, as the train puffed through Kiev, he wound wire around a wooden dowel, slid the dowel free, and snipped the length of the resulting coil with cutters, creating a pile of little rings.

At last the train screeched to a stop. It had taken a spur of track that cut past an enormous open square, perhaps three hundred yards on a side and bordered by tall buildings, beyond which rose columns of smoke and flame. Half the stone square was crowded with market carts and sooty freestanding tents. The other half, the side closest to the tracks, had been painted off, clearly set aside for the circus. Just beyond the tracks lay the slate-gray Dnepro River. Oil glistened in a rainbow sheen on its surface far below the cut stone banks. Steel boats of varying sizes chugged along in orderly procession, their stacks spewing yet more smoke into the already overburdened air.

The moment the train halted, the door to Dodd’s car jerked open and in popped a portly man with long mustaches under a bowler hat. His name was Harry Burks, and he was the advance man, the person who traveled ahead of the circus to start the publicity and smooth the way with local officials. He spoke a dozen languages and loved nothing more than spending an evening in a pub making new friends. Gavin had never known him to forget a name or a face.

“Dodd!” Harry boomed. “Right on time. Good, good! You know how the Ukrainians feel about punctuality.”

“What’s the news, Harry?” Dodd asked.

“Nothing major, thank heavens, thank heavens. We have the southern half of the market square for as long as we need it, and we can leave the train on this side spur, though I had to promise the chief of police and the town council and their families front-row tickets along with the usual bribes. Placards are already up all over town, and I’ve taken out advertisements in all the usual places. I’m also trying something new—paying hansom cabs and spiders a small fee to paste placards on themselves. Walking advertisements, you know. We’ll see if it helps, if it helps.”

“Fine idea,” said Dodd.

“And remind everyone not to go out after dark,” Harry warned. “Kiev clockworkers can snatch anyone off the street after sunset, and there’s nothing you can do about it, nothing you can do.”

Dodd nodded. “Will do. And the other matter?”

Harry gave a sideways glance at Gavin. “Not a word, not a word. Your little friends may have been the toast of Berlin, but no one’s talking about a reward for an American boy or an English girl, and clockwork cats are all the rage in Kiev. I think you can come out and breathe some smoky air at last, my boy.”

A load of tension drained from Gavin, and he slumped in the padded chair. Freedom at last!

“But,” Harry continued, holding up a finger, “there are other rumors. I’m hearing tales about a young woman, an angel who cures the plague with a touch,
with a touch, and of her young lover who makes beautiful music for her.”

“Uh-oh,” Gavin said. “How is word getting around so fast?”

“Who knows, who knows?” Harry shrugged. “But there is more. The newspapers are saying there are fewer new cases of plague, and more of those who have it are recovering. Recovering! People are beginning to hope. That should give you reason to be careful, my boy, especially here.”

“I’m always careful,” Gavin said, though even as he said it, he knew it was mostly a lie. “But why here?”

“Don’t forget that Kiev is supposedly the birthplace of the plague. She certainly has more zombies and clockworkers than anywhere else in the world, and it’s a pity the Zalizniak and Gonta put all their resources into machines of war. They might have found a cure of their own, otherwise. At any rate, if the general population learns where to find you and that young lady, you’ll be overrun, like Jesus and the lepers. So watch your step, my boy, watch your step.”

An image of Alice caught in a mad mob of desperate plague victims flashed through Gavin’s mind and his fingers went cold. “Understood, sir,” he said.

Dodd rubbed his hands. “Let’s get set up. I want the midway ready by nightfall so we can make parade by tomorrow afternoon.”

Outside the train, a crowd was already gathering under the gloomy sky, though everyone stayed carefully outside the painted boundaries. Here, no one stepped out of line. Once again, something about the crowd nagged at Gavin. He examined the people, trying
not to stare, but still he couldn’t work it out. They looked perfectly normal. Perhaps a few more than the usual had clockwork pieces or prosthetics, but that wasn’t it. Gavin shook his head. It would come to him later, he was sure.

Performers in work clothes spilled out of the other train cars and slid open the boxcar doors. The animals within howled, roared, and growled with agitation, glad to see sunlight, however hazy. Gavin sympathized. An official-looking man dressed in a blue uniform and accompanied by a brass spider the size of a collie strode up to Dodd and spoke in Ukrainian, to which Dodd smiled blankly. Harry stepped forward and took over, withdrawing a sheaf of stamped papers from his coat pocket while the circus buzzed to life and the drab crowd watched with interest. The cool autumn air was heavy with acrid smoke and steam, no little of which was added by the circus’s own locomotive. Gavin smelled coal and ash and dust and polluted river water, but the city air wasn’t as close as the air within the train car, and Gavin stretched, enjoying it.

Despite frequent visits when he was younger, Gavin had never been part of the circus setting up, and he turned to Dodd with a certain amount of excitement, especially after spending nearly a month in hiding with so little to do.

“What can I do to help?” he asked.

“You have no idea what you’re doing,” Dodd said frankly, “so the best thing you can do is stay out of the way.”

The circus performers worked liked a well-oiled mechanical. First the mahouts led the elephants, both
mechanical and biological, out of the boxcars while other roustabouts hauled out enormous rolls of canvas and bundles of wooden stakes with the ease of long practice. It wasn’t possible to pound tent stakes through cobblestones, but before Gavin could wonder about that for too long, he saw a pair of roustabouts slide a stake into a hole that already existed, drilled long ago for exactly this purpose. It meant that the circus had no flexibility about what tent could go where or how big each could be, but it did allow a circus or other events to exist in the center of a city with no parks or grassy squares. The roustabout teams pounded the long stakes into the earth below the street with sledgehammers while teams of other workers laid out canvas. Once two rows of stakes were all in place and the red-striped canvas was laid out between them, the roustabouts pushed two long poles under the canvas and propped them up to create an opening underneath. Two more poles were placed farther in to lengthen the opening, which made enough space for the next step.

The mahout whistled, and the mechanical elephant puffed and snorted its way into the dark interior. Roustabouts followed with more long poles. Gavin, itching with curiosity, couldn’t stand it anymore. He ran down to the tent and ducked inside. The brass elephant, now operating with perfect efficiency under Alice’s careful repairs, was dragging tall, heavy tent poles upright, thereby shoving the tent’s roof higher and higher. Gavin stood out of the way, feeling like a child near the enormous mechanical beast in the increasingly larger space. Once there was enough room, more
elephants—live ones—were brought in, and the work went faster. The three enormous center poles took a trio of elephants to haul upright, with the trapeze artists and spiders up in the rigging to ensure they were set properly at the roof. Other spiders scampered about, fastening ropes and tying knots. The center ring was hauled in piecemeal and fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. An automaton wheeled the talking clock woman to the entrance and wound her up, touched her metal cheek, and went off to help with other jobs. More people brought in bleacher seats to assemble, and the tent became loud with clacks, clatters, clinks, and shouts. For once, the clockwork plague kept its distance, and the analytical side of Gavin’s brain remained quiet, allowing him to watch in wonder as the Tilt assembled around him like a genie rising from the desert.