The Impossible Cube: A Novel of the Clockwork Empire (11 page)

Eventually the parade made its way to a field at the edge of town. The big striped tent—called the Tilt, Gavin remembered—rose up among a number of smaller tents and circus wagons. Off to one side waited the red locomotive and bright boxcars Gavin had seen from the airship earlier just before a clockworker fugue had taken him away. If not for the clockwork plague and the unexpected memory of his father, he might have recognized the train right away instead of recalling it later. He had also seen the flyers for the Kalakos Circus plastered about Luxembourg by the advance man, but they were in French and he hadn’t paid close attention to them. He wasn’t sure how he had missed the name; the French version wasn’t so very different.

The parade continued right up to the complex of tents. Behind the parade came an enormous crowd, all ready to see the show. The performers quickly scattered, some toward the Tilt, some to the sideshow tents, and others to direct the oncoming crowd toward the ticket sellers, who wore stovepipe hats with oversized tickets attached to the top so people could locate them. An intricately decorated mechanical clock at the entrance of the Tilt ran backward, counting down the minutes until the performance began. A life-sized female automaton was attached to the clock, and even as Gavin watched, she jerked to life. She had only head, chest, and arms, and Gavin assumed this made her sufficiently inhuman to make her legal under Luxembourg law.

“Mesdames et messieurs!”
she called in a voice that carried from one end of the circus to the other.
“Le spectacle commencera dans cinquante-cinq minutes! Mesdames et messieurs! Le spectacle commencera dans cinquante-cinq minutes!”
And then she went still.

Nearly an hour before the show, according to the clock. The extra time, Gavin recalled, gave the audience a chance to buy tickets, then get bored and decide to spend money at the sideshow.

A firm grip took Gavin’s elbow. “The ringmaster wants to see you in his car,” said Bonzini, “and you better not have sneezed inside my nose.”

The ringmaster kept an entire train car to himself. Alice took off the red top hat. Feng pulled on his shirt and tried to smooth out the wrinkles. Bonzini ushered the three of them inside, but didn’t enter himself. The car had a large bed, comfortable chairs, two wardrobes,
a small stove, full bookshelves, and a perfectly functional bar. It hadn’t changed since Gavin had seen it more than two years ago. Neither had Dodd, who was waiting for them.

“Good God, Gavin,” he said, his face split into a wide grin. “I hope you have a good explanation for nearly wrecking my parade today. Who are these people? And where’s Cousin Felix?”

He pulled Gavin into a warm embrace without waiting for an answer, and Gavin suddenly found himself at the top of an upswell of emotion. His throat thickened, and words wouldn’t come. The memory of Captain Felix Naismith’s last moments slammed through Gavin, and he saw the captain’s expression as a pirate’s glass fléchette sliced his flesh and ended his life. He heard the small sound that escaped the captain’s throat and felt the thud as the captain’s body slammed into the deck.

Dodd read Gavin’s expression. “No.”

“Yeah,” Gavin said thickly. “Uh, this may take a while to explain.”

“Mesdames et messieurs! Le spectacle commencera dans cinquante minutes!”

“I have fifty minutes,” Dodd said.

Alice set Gavin’s fiddle and the rucksack with the cure in the corner and everyone sat down. Gavin introduced Alice and Feng and then started in with the loss of the
Juniper
to pirates, moving to the death of Dodd’s cousin, Captain Felix Naismith. Dodd’s face hardened as the story progressed. Alice went to the little bar and came back with a half-full glass, which Dodd drained with a shaky hand when Gavin finished.

“I haven’t seen him in almost two years,” Dodd said in a hoarse voice. “I had no idea he was dead. Oh, God. What am I going to do?”

Gavin didn’t know what to say. Alice and Feng, who didn’t know Dodd at all, sat in uncomfortable silence.

“Mesdames et messieurs! Le spectacle commencera dans vingt minutes!”

“We go months without contact,” Dodd said, “but that was all right. I was so glad when he got off that stupid scow he played second mate for and got on a real ship, and he was so happy when Boston Mail gave him his own command. Youngest captain in their fleet, he is. Was. Now he’s gone. Shit.”

Alice coughed, and Dodd raised his glass to her in apology, then stared off into space. Dodd was young himself for a circus ringmaster, barely thirty, with large brown eyes that made him look even younger, despite the side whiskers. Gavin glanced at him, then around the little car. Whenever the
Juniper
was in a European port, Captain Naismith checked to see if the Kalakos Circus was in town too, and if it was, he always took Gavin and Tom with him to visit. The cousins caught up while the cabin boys got free run of the show. After the performance, Dodd gave them treats from the grease wagon, or even a windup toy from his workshop.

“I’m sorry to bring bad news,” Gavin said. “I miss him, too. And Tom. But there’s more.”

Gavin gave a thumbnail sketch of how Alice’s aunt Edwina had used her cure for the clockwork plague to manipulate Gavin and Alice into joining the Third Ward so Edwina could destroy it, and how Lieutenant Phipps was now chasing them—

“Wait,” Dodd interrupted. He pointed at Alice. “You’re a baroness who can cure the clockwork plague?” He pointed at Gavin. “And you’ve become a clockworker?”

Gavin nodded. “Yes. Now we—”

“What do you do?” Dodd interrupted again, this time pointing at Feng. “Walk on water?”

“With a good running start,” Feng replied.

“Mesdames et messieurs! Le spectacle commencera dans cinq minutes!”

A sharp knock came at the door, and a red-haired man with startling blue eyes poked his head into the car. He wore an Arran fisherman’s sweater and a cloth cap. “Dodd? Show’s on. Are you— Gavin! Good Lord, lad, it’s been ages. Where are Tom and Felix?”

Dodd rose a little unsteadily. “They’re dead, Nathan.”

“Oh, Jesus.” Nathan strode in and caught Dodd in an embrace that went on for rather longer than most Englishmen or Irishmen felt comfortable with. Gavin suddenly put together a number of cues that had completely escaped him when he was younger. He glanced at Feng, who cocked his head, and the ridiculousness of the situation occurred to him. A baroness with an iron spider on her arm, a plague-infested airman, and an undiplomatic Chinaman hiding from a giant mechanical with a circus ringmaster who fell in love with men. A wave of mirth suddenly overcame Gavin, and inappropriate laughter bubbled in his throat. Alice glared at him. Feng looked surprised. The laughter bubbled up again, and this time Gavin couldn’t stop it. He laughed and laughed and pounded the little table
with his fist and laughed some more. The odds of any of this happening were so high, they were impossible to calculate. Just the idea that his own ancestors would meet and produce offspring that would end in him while Alice’s and Feng’s own families were doing the same thing, completely unaware that the culmination of their work and toil and sex would end in a circus with a ringmaster who dabbed it up with men. Trillions upon trillions of events, both enormous and minuscule, had to take place in perfect sequence in order for this meeting to occur and if any one of them had failed to happen, the three of them would be somewhere else—or perhaps they wouldn’t even exist. Best of all, they wouldn’t even know the difference. Maybe they didn’t know the difference
now.

Gavin doubled over, cackling and howling at the joke. Voices and faces swirled in a twisted rainbow around him. A slight stinging to his face told him he’d been slapped, but it didn’t faze him in the slightest. He laughed and laughed and then the world went black.

Sometime later, Gavin bolted awake. He always bolted awake. The attack by the pirate Madoc Blue and the lashing Gavin had endured afterward had destroyed peaceful sleep and gradual waking. By now, he had forgotten what it was to slip calmly out of slumber and greet the day without sweat on his forehead and his heart in his mouth. He sat up and found he was on the bed with his shoes off.

The sunlight had moved, and the car was dimmer. At the little table sat Nathan Storm, his sunset hair gleaming in the low light. The man was smoking a
pipe, and the pungent tobacco smoke floated in a blue cloud near the ceiling. Everyone else was gone.

“Nice to see you among the living.” Nathan puffed gently.

“Where’s Alice?” Gavin asked.

“Exploring the midway. She slept and then wanted some air.” He drew on the pipe again. “That was interesting. You were cackling like…”

Gavin found his shoes on the floor and laced them on. “Like a lunatic? Yeah. Clockworkers are mad. You know that.”

“What’s it like?” Nathan said.

“It’s hard to describe.” Gavin sighed. “The plague shows me things, strange things,
true
things. I’m not insane. Not really.”

“You sounded pretty mad. You really hurt Dodd.”

Gavin winced. “Shit. Oh, shit. I’m sorry, Nathan.”

His pipe went out, and he tapped it into a bowl on the table. “You’re apologizing to the wrong person.”

“He and Felix aren’t—weren’t—really cousins, were they?”

That earned him a short bark of laughter. “You
were
young, weren’t you? They met in Hamburg when Felix was working some leaky old airship and Dodd was still winding spiders for Viktor Kalakos. They tried to stay together, meeting up in whatever large cities they could, but it just didn’t work. They did stay close friends. Dodd doesn’t have any other family, so he started calling him
Cousin Felix
, and it stuck.”

“And now you two…”

“Not ‘now,’ Gavin. For years. Since before Felix started bringing you to visit.”

“Right.” Gavin rubbed his face and remembered Simon, whose romantic tastes ran in the same direction. What were the chances? The corners of his mouth quirked, and he quickly ended that line of thought. “Even clockworkers can be stupid.”

“Damn right. You want something to eat? I’ve got beans and bread here, unless you’d fancy a candyfloss.”

At the mention of food, Gavin’s stomach growled, and he went light-headed. “How long was I… away?”

“All the way through the first show. The second starts in a few minutes.”

Nathan brought him a plate at the bed as if he were an invalid, but Gavin got up and ate at the table. He felt perfectly fine, except for the hunger.

“Where’s Dodd?” he asked around a mouthful.

Nathan looked surprised. “Dodd’s in the ring. The show must go on. If you’re done eating, let’s go find your two friends so you can tell me what you’re really here for. I don’t think you hid in the parade just to have an excuse to deliver bad news.”

Outside, afternoon was fading into evening. The Tilt and the tents cast canted shadows over brightly painted wagons. Gavin knew from his previous visits that the wealthier performers lived in the wagons, which were rolled into the train’s boxcars when circus left town. Poorer performers lived in tents. Other tents housed the sideshow exhibits and the animal cages. Smells of fried food and cooking sugar mingled with calliope music. Men, women, and children wandered about. A few stood in line outside the main entrance of the Tilt, handing over their tickets so they could file
inside to find seats as the clock automaton shouted in French that the show would begin in one minute. The performers were out of sight behind the Tilt, awaiting cues and entries.

“There you are!” Alice threw her arms around his neck in a near choke hold and kissed him. “You scared the life out of me. Us.”

“I’m sorry. I need to apologize to Dodd.”

“You must wait,” Feng said. “The performance will begin soon. Mr. Storm, could we go into the main tent? We should not be out in the open in case Phipps has tracked us here.”

Nathan nodded and took them past the ticket taker into the Tilt. Inside, tall rows of bleachers were bent around a wide red ring, and chatting, laughing people filled most of the spaces. Sawdust lay scattered on the ground. Food sellers moved among them with trays of rich-smelling roasted peanuts and pink cotton candy. Off to one side, the automaton played its calliope. Just as the group arrived on one side of the ring, the tent flaps on the opposite side exploded open and Dodd strode into the Tilt. He had his red hat back, and his silver-topped cane waved in time to the music. Behind him came the mechanical elephant, its feet thudding unevenly on the packed earthen floor. The mahout looked a little seasick at the uneven footsteps. Then came a rainbow explosion of clowns and a group of horses, both live and mechanical, accompanied by slender girls in white feathered dresses, and behind them came acrobats in tight red shirts. A trainer led a lion on a leash and made it roar. For the hell of it, Gavin snatched the recording nightingale from his pocket
and pressed the left eye just as the trainer made the lion roar a second time. Then he held the nightingale to his ear and pressed the right eye. It opened its beak and roared like a little lion, which made the real lion look around, startled. Alice shot him a hard look. Oops. He hadn’t realized it would be so loud. Gavin stuffed the nightingale into his pocket and looked innocent. The parade, a smaller one than the one in town, stomped round the ring and stormed out to cheers and applause from the audience while Dodd went into the center and leaped onto a small platform with stars on it.

“Bienvenue,”
he said,
“au le Kalakos Cirque International du Automates et d’Autres Merveilles!”

The audience, pleased that Dodd spoke their language, burst into more applause just as a troupe of clowns somersaulted into the ring. Dodd got out of the way, and the show began in earnest. He caught sight of Nathan and his entourage lurking at the edge of the bleachers and trotted over.

“I’m sorry,” Gavin said before he could speak. “We clockworkers do stupid things sometimes. It’s not an excuse, just an explanation. I’m sorry.”

Dodd nodded. “You’re my last link to Felix, Gavin. I can’t be angry with you.”