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Tarvek’s jaw firmed up. “A very good first try.” His hand slid back around her head and flipped a small switch. “Goodbye, Anevka.”

There was a burst of static from her voice speaker, and the light in her eyes faded out.

Tarvek slid to the floor and for several minutes, the young man was racked with sobs. Suddenly, he gave a final great sniff, and his crying stopped. “That...” he muttered shakily, “Was harder than I thought it would be.”

He then rubbed his eyes, stood back up, and got to work. He had a plan.

CHAPTER 12

           One day The Baron was out a-walking, when by the side of the road, he found two injured constructs.

           They possessed the faces and torsos of beautiful women, and the bodies of deadly serpents.

           “Help us, kind sir,” the creatures begged.

           “Of course,” said The Baron. He took them to his castle, and patiently nursed them back to health.

           And when they both were once again sleek and strong, the first one bit him with her deadly, poisonous fangs.

           “Why did you do that?” screamed the second construct.

           “He helped us!”

           The first construct shrugged. “He shouldn’t be surprised.

           He knew that we were monsters when he took us in.”

           “But we don’t have to act like monsters,” said the second.

           “I have chosen not to!”

           “And that,” said The Baron to the second construct as he revealed the armor beneath his clothing and drew forth his terrible sword, “Is why you will live.”

—A Tale of the Baron/collected in the town of Buhuşi, Romania

With a twist and a snap, Tarvek removed Anevka’s head from her body. Tenderly, he placed it in a small cabinet. “Sleep well, Anevka,” he whispered as he shut the cabinet door. He then pulled out various tools and reconnected the hoses that Lucrezia had sliced free. When the catafalque was reconnected, he pulled a small key from an inner pocket and unlocked a metal canister that had sat, unnoticed, upon one of the room’s shelves. The lid slid back into itself, and another clank head blinked in the light, and looked up at Tarvek with a grin.

This face was slightly different from Anevka’s. It was more expressive, and Tarvek knew that it would take some getting used to. He reached in and pulled the head out. “Hello, Lucrezia,” he said.

Privately, Tarvek had any number of reservations about this. He had been rather stunned when Lucrezia had explained that the Summoning Engine didn’t transport a personality from some distant location, it received a personality blueprint, as it were, and built a new copy onto an existing brain. Theoretically, any number of additional Lucrezias could be thus created.

Overlaying a new mind upon an established personality was quite difficult. Lucrezia had designed the device to imprint upon her young daughter, which went a long way towards explaining why all the other girls who had been collected by the Geisterdamen over the years, had failed to survive.

However, now that Lucrezia was here, she had demonstrated that it was the but work of mere minutes to recalibrate the device so that it would be able to download a new version of her personality into any girl at all.

Reconstructing a human mind onto a clank’s cognitive engine had seemed like an insurmountable challenge to Tarvek, but Lucrezia had breezily claimed that she had prior experience transferring organic intellects to mechanical systems and visa versa. This disquieting claim was only made more so when she had demonstrated how easy it was for her to do, once Tarvek had constructed a new, untuned clank head.

The implications of this, and the realization that she had obviously already performed these experiments, had given Tarvek serious nightmares the few times he had managed to grab some desperately needed sleep.

The head in his hand smiled. “Tarvek, dear boy! I was beginning to think something had gone wrong.”

“Sorry. Perhaps I should have put a clock in with you. You know, like a puppy.”

“Father raised Sparkhunds[70].” Lucrezia replied conversationally. “They tended to eat clocks. We lost Auntie Skullchula’s favorite grandfather clock that way.”

Tarvek changed the subject. “This face is far more expressive than the last clank face. Some of my best work, really.”

“Not too much better, I trust,” Lucrezia said with a frown. “We don’t want people to notice.”

Tarvek smiled reassuringly. “You change your wigs, why not your face?” A thought occurred to him. “Actually, you could tell the townspeople this is how your face always was, and that’s what they’d tell anyone who asked.”

Lucrezia laughed in delight. “Oh, this will be easy! Now where is my sister?”

Tarvek tucked the head under his arm and threaded his way through the sprawled bodies on the floor. “She’s knocked out, but she’ll be fine.”

Lucrezia’s eyes darted about trying to see everything. Tarvek paused, and slowly spun about, letting her see the entire room. “Heavens,” she remarked. “I seem to have missed quite the party.”

They arrived at the frozen clank, and Tarvek quickly slotted the head onto the neck. “Nonsense,” he said, as he grabbed the head and gave it a final twist, snapping it into place. “The real party is just about to start!”

The reintegrated Lucrezia clank gave a shudder, and she stepped forward. She raised her hands, patted her head, and gingerly rotated it about. “That felt most peculiar,” she declared.

Tarvek turned away to get her wig. “Does everything work? Fingers? Toes?”

A sharp pinch upon his fundament caused him to whoop and leap upwards in surprise. When he spun about, Lucrezia regarded him innocently.

“I appear to have delicate motor control,” she reported, while waggling her fingers.

“That almost makes up for your lack of overall control,” he retorted.

Lucrezia stepped forward to retrieve the wig that had fallen to the ground and found herself pulled up short by the hoses connecting her to the catafalque.

She turned back to Tarvek. “Do I actually need this thing? It’s most inconvenient.”

Tarvek swallowed the lump in his throat. “No,” He said huskily, “No you don’t. But too many people outside of Sturmhalten know about it. In my opinion, we should keep it around until things die down, then we can come up with some story.”

Lucrezia nodded slowly. “Yes, too many astonishing things at once would look suspicious.” She looked over at the bearers stretched out upon the floor.

“That one doesn’t look at all well.”

“He’s dead.”

“Oh, yes, that would do it.”

“A little surprise from your sister, when my sister proved a bit recalcitrant.”

Lucrezia examined the wound and nodded. “Well, I do so love surprises.”

Tarvek jerked a thumb over to the door. “There’s a group of townspeople waiting outside. You can choose one of them to replace him. But we’d best get moving, they won’t wait forever.”

Lucrezia placed the wig on her head and delicately tucked it into place. “They will if I tell them to,” she muttered. She turned about and allowed Tarvek to buckle the coat on around her hoses. “But you’re right of course. The Baron’s man won’t.”

She turned a delivered nudge with her foot to the back of the Lucrezia’s head. “Wake up this instant, you lazy girl!”

вернуться

70

Sparkhunds were a breed of wolf/mastiff hybrids, specially bred to hunt down Sparks. It was inevitable that some of the more perverse Sparks had found the concept amusing, and thus had made their own contributions to the breed. As a result, the Sparkhunds at the time of our story were enormous, semi-intelligent creatures with rudimentary hands and jaws that could tear through armor plating. Naturally they still hunted Sparks, but now they enjoyed it.