Agatha H. And the Clockwork Princess (65 page)

13 Both Bangladesh and Gilgamesh would have been distressed to read the field reports that assessed the two of them as being an excellent team. It had certainly kept the Baron from sleeping for several nights.

14 By now, the keen student of Spark history will be asking, “Is this the same Count Leovanovitch Pieotre Rasmussin who was responsible for the destruction of the Royal Palace of St. Petersburg through the cunning use of excessive syncopated dancing , which caused a resonance disaster after the Tsar seduced his wife, Zolenka? The answer is, we don’t know. But it wouldn’t surprise us.

15 The Spark in question, one Hugo Von Bodé, had enjoyed sending his creations out on random voyages of chaos and destruction “Just to keep things from getting boring!” Klaus had taken some pains to ensure that his last minutes had been anything but.

16 Boris Vasily Konstantin Andrei Myshkin Dolokhov was one of the most fascinating of Baron Wulfenbach’s inner circle. The Baron had rescued him from slavery and Boris repaid him with a lifetime of loyalty. Although he frequently assumed total control of the Empire when the Baron was injured or indisposed, he never seems to have been tempted to exploit this power for his own ends. He simply took joy in things functioning smoothly and efficiently. By all accounts, he was reckoned the most boring man in the Empire.

17 Lilith, Agatha’s foster mother, had been an exuberant proponent of the preserving, canning, drying and pickling of various fruits and vegetables. Agatha had once complained that this might make sense if the Clays managed a farm, but in fact, they lived in town, and all of the produce they processed was purchased from local green-grocers. Lilith had said nothing at the time, but that night, Agatha awakened and discovered that, after midnight, her parents’ forge served as a gathering place for constructs she had never seen before. These were twisted, bizarre creations. Things that could never feel comfortable out in public, despite the Baron’s laws enforcing tolerance. They labored in the many unseen jobs offered by the University. Despite their often horrific appearance, Agatha found them to be intelligent, well-read, and urbane, in their own strange way. It was these creatures who received the bulk of the preserved food. The Clays always refused direct payment, but Agatha now understood the source of the many odd and useful things that appeared overnight upon the Clay’s doorstep.

18 Then, as now, Paris has always been a safe guess when outlandish or bizarre fashion is the topic.

19 Historically, the construct, Punch, had been one of the Heterodyne Boys’ constant companions, along with his wife, Judy. In the Heterodyne plays, Punch was portrayed as an oafish, freakishly strong clown. This greatly annoyed Agatha’s foster-father, Adam, who had in fact, been Punch, before he changed his name.

20 Professional traveling entertainers were expected to be able to sing, dance, juggle, tell jokes, and play several musical instruments. In addition, they were supposed to have some secondary side-show skill, such as knife throwing, fire eating, acrobatics, or being short. At any given time they had to be able to memorize enough material that the circus could perform two full shows, in excess of two hours, every day, for two weeks without repeating anything. Proficiency with weapons was also considered a plus. To join a quality show such as Master Payne’s, one would also need some non-entertainment skill that would be useful to the troupe, such as brewing, mycology, or picking pockets. But hey, it beat working.

21 The language of the Geisterdamen, developing as it did without any Indo-European influences, has always been a thing of unfamiliar cadences and bizarre word structure. To recreate the sense of confusion and unfamiliarity that the linguistically cosmopolitan Lady Heterodyne must have experienced the first time she heard it, we have helpfully rendered all of the Geisterdamen’s dialogue as gibberish.

22 It is true that most madboy devices are built for purely utilitarian purposes: I want to go faster; How can one person stack all of these starfish; I will gain the respect of my peers if I can turn this entire town into ham, and so on. But there are some things that burst forth from their creator’s brain simply because they want to make the world more aesthetically pleasing. So what if it doesn’t help one conquer the world? It looks awesome. It’s Art.

23 This sort of historical revisionism is quite common amongst entertainers. If something amazing or terrible happens to them out in the wilderness, then by golly, when it gets told to the paying customers, it’s going to have a satisfying conclusion. It’s analogous to writing a business loss off on one’s taxes.

24 The troupe’s dressmaker, Organza Fifield, had once won a bet by visually deducing the correct clothing sizes of an unfamiliar group of men who had, at the time, been dressed respectively, as an armored knight, a monk, a construct with three arms, and a pantomime horse.

25 In the Transylvanian region, Saint Nikkolaus is known as a benevolent Spark who has learned how to bend time and space in such a way that he can deliver presents to good children everywhere in one night. His companion, Blank Peter, is a construct, who does all the heavy lifting. So onerous is this job, that Blank Peter actually wears out from the strain (cookies depicting him are a holiday favorite, and small children take a sadistic joy in “nibbling Blank Peter Down.”). Jolly old St. Nikkolaus then selects several “Bad Children,” takes them back home to Spain and uses them to create a new Blank Peter. Thus the Christmas season continues to be a time of both joy and terror, as it should be.

26 Yeti was a very tall Asiatic man covered in a coat of soft, golden fur. He claimed that he came from an enlightened, five-thousand-year-old utopia, the last remnant of a lost civilization that had deliberately hidden itself away from the eyes of mankind high in the Himalayan Mountains near Tibet. He further claimed that everyone there was as tall, as furry, and as Sparky as himself. Nobody believed this, of course, since Yeti’s accent sounded exactly like the ones found in the Chinese neighborhoods in Istanbul, but they agreed that it was a great story.

27 Science has proven that this position actually improves memorization. One of the reasons older people have difficulty remembering things is that they refuse to sit like this because they feel foolish doing so. More fool they.

28 Admittedly, attacks these days were few and far between, but Zumzum had a fair number of young people who maintained a fine old tradition of nighttime assignations. This assured that the scope was manned almost constantly. Sergeant Zulli always glumly predicted that when the town was attacked, it would be on a cold and rainy night.

29 It wasn’t.

30 While mercantile trade was common within the Empire, there were certain local specialties that simply didn’t travel well. For the best Viennese pastries, for example, you had to go to Vienna. Every town had a local beer, seasonal fruit, wine, fried dough recipe or scam for cheating tourists that the locals were proud of.

31 Grounded was the term used when a Spark was sane enough to function on a day-to-day basis. It says a lot that many people, including Sparks, are unfamiliar with the term.

32 Regular travelers throughout the Empire were issued warning signs by the Empire and required to post them, as well as report on problems they’d encountered. The penalties for anyone except the Baron’s troops removing a warning sign usually involved becoming a warning sign yourself.

33 In addition to rewarding travelers who posted warning signs, the Baron’s agents were known to pay well for unusual specimens. Initially, there had been a number of people who had decided to “put one over” on the Baron by constructing and selling him fake madboy tech and handmade chimeras. The Baron bought them all, and the counterfeiters had a good laugh—until these same fakes appeared at various museums and auction houses, where they made the Empire significantly more money than it had paid out.

34 Krosp did indeed try to run Moxana. The experiment was abandoned after he got his whiskers caught in the mechanisms for the second time.

35 The High Priestess was a favorite stock character in the Heterodyne Plays. She represented all of the exotic Sparks who ruled mysterious, far-off lands and lost, barbaric civilizations who started out as antagonists, but invariably fell in love with Barry Heterodyne.

36 Indeed, one Herr Doktor Flatmo actually left the circus in disgrace when Agatha’s mathematics revealed that his so-called “perpetual motion engine” actually required a slight push every ten and a half years in order to keep running. Oh, everyone was very nice about it in public, of course, but still…

37 The Cylinder of Touch was a breathtaking creation of colored glass and wire. Its creator, Herr Doktor Potrzebie Spün, invited customers to place their hands on it to “Feel something extraordinary!” It evidently had been quite extraordinary, considering how much they screamed.

38 On the surface, this was a legitimate observation. In his carefree youth, Klaus Wulfenbach had been a frequent companion-in-arms to Bill and Barry. But in subsequent years, as he had become more prominent, the Muse of Comedy had not been kind to him. In the Heterodyne plays, young Klaus was usually portrayed as an excitable coward. The first to turn tail, the first to gloat when he had the upper hand, the first to beg piteously for his life when captured, and after the inevitable victory, the first to claim the credit. Klaus was perfectly aware of these portrayals, yet allowed them to continue. The reason was simple: he found them hilarious.

39 As has been mentioned, Agatha’s foster-mother, the construct Lilith (AKA Judy, the famous construct companion to the Heterodyne Boys), not only played the piano, but gave lessons in Beetleburg. According to anecdotal evidence, while young Agatha had trouble concentrating on tasks that involved engineering or math, music apparently came easier. At Lilith’s insistence, Dr. Beetle arranged for her to receive advanced training from some of the music masters at Transylvania Polygnostic University. An assessment from when Agatha was fourteen reads; “Subject has a refreshing appreciation of music. Superior mechanical aptitude. However it is my considered opinion that she lacks the fire and raw emotion required of a great player.” (from The Heterodyne Collection/ Transylvania Polygnostic Library, Beetleburg)

40 From this description, as well as the others in this chapter, we can be fairly certain that Moxana was using the legendary Queen’s Tarot Deck. This deck was commissioned by Albia of England, and illustrated by the Polish alchemist Cagliostro. Albia supposedly designed many of the cards herself, in the process renaming most of the Major Arcana. Today, only three complete decks are known to survive. One is in the British Museum, one is in the Restricted Collection of the Louvre, and one is in The Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The implication that Moxana possessed a deck, while intriguing, has yet to be actually confirmed. The Queen’s Tarot is of particular interest to scholars, because according to anecdotal evidence, everyone who used it either went mad or spontaneously combusted.

41 Andronicus Valois, the Storm King, that charismatic historical figure who united Europa against the Heterodynes, pioneered the practice of absorbing a conquered enemy’s forces. A strategy that Klaus Wulfenbach later adopted with great success. The greatest of the King’s Sparks, was one R. van Rijn. Details about the man are frustratingly vague. We know that he claimed to be from one of the old Dutch Kingdoms and that he was always afraid that he would be assassinated, though he would never explain why. Contemporary writings suggest that he went to great lengths to obscure information about himself from becoming common knowledge, to the point where he even refused to sit for a portrait by the King’s artist-in-residence. Some have suggested that he was a fictional creation, and that his work was actually made by Andronicus Valois himself. The Muses themselves vehemently deny this.

42 The Storm King’s Muses were unquestionably Van Rijn’s greatest accomplishment. They were a set of nine clanks designed to embody various attributes that Van Rijn considered important for a ruler to know. They would guide, teach and instruct the Storm King in the various disciplines that would enable him to not just win a war, but wisely govern afterward. While there is no question that Andronicus was a superb administrator and manipulator, his journals reveal that the scope of the Empire was beginning to tax even his capabilities. As far as The Muses themselves, much has been claimed about their abilities, and many of these claims seem outlandish. However Van Rijn, in one of his few surviving letters (“Letter to ‘D’.” Currently held in the Non-Animate Library of Munich), confessed that with the Muses, he had produced something that he himself did not fully understand. —“But they have most kindly told me not to worry about it.”

43 Dr. Beetle, the Tyrant of Beetleburg and master of the University, had been a friend of Barry Heterodyne, and one of the few people who had known the truth of Agatha’s lineage, as well as the secret of her locket. He had kept her as close as possible by making her one of his lab assistants. The Lady Heterodyne has acknowledged that he was responsible for teaching her much about laboratory methodology, small town management, and advanced ranting.

44 Bartolomeo Christofori di Francesco was an Italian creator of musical instruments. He is credited with inventing the piano. This invention did not experience great success however, until two years later, when he invented the piano bench.

45 This useful little hand gesture tends to be made as surreptitiously as possible, since even crude, home-brewed clanks tended to be big, fast, and possessed of an fine sense of self-preservation.

46 In the Heterodyne plays, Lucrezia Mongfish was the ingénue, to be sure, but initially, she was always portrayed as a comically evil figure, who was vain, megalomaniacal, treacherous and an inveterate liar. She was always redeemed by the power of Bill Heterodyne’s love sometime in the third act, but until then, she was an audience favorite.