Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables Read Free Page A

from Gisel’s mouth. If it hadn’t been for the cagelike mechanism bolted into place around the dowager’s voluminous silken skirt, her anger might have been enough to take off the offending girl’s head.
    “Don’t—”
Herr Dr.
Pavel laid a restraining hand across Anton’s chest as he had stepped forward from the wall. “I’ll take care of it.”
    Tears had diluted pink the blood that Gisel smeared with her palm as she huddled into a ball, knees against her breast. She barely looked up as the doctor interposed himself between her and the dowager. “But an accident,” he soothed. “No harm was intended—”
    The dowager’s rage continued without respite. She was even smiling, a slash across her starkly rouged face, as her gloved and jeweled hand struck the doctor. Her eyes glittered in triumph as he fell at her feet.
    A blow such as that wouldn’t have been enough to kill the doctor—Anton knew that. Perhaps it was the shame, to be treated as a mere servant in front of all this nobility. It didn’t matter. He pressed his own spine tighter to the paneled wall, gazing with dire presentiment at the unmoving figure crumpled on the ballroom floor.

    T he manager of the dowager’s estates came down to the cellar, to talk with Anton.
    He sat on a little wooden crate that at one time had held canisters of grease for the machinery clanking and wheezing all about them. Up above, he could hear the dancing. The unmanned violins slid their bows across the strings, the sprightly rhythms impelling the aristocratic figures through their motions. Or seeming to—all knew, but pretended not to, that it was actually the various armatures that moved through the openings in the ballroom floor, their pistons and hinges connected to the curved metal bands fastened around the elegant guests.
    “You’re aware, aren’t you, that this person’s dead?”
    Anton looked over to where the manager, in his black livery, tilted the doctor’s chin with an ink-stained finger. The old man’s face was gray and slack, his eyes already filming over.
    “Yes—” He nodded. “I knew that. Even before they brought him down here.”
    The distant instruments skirled and stuttered through a Hungarian
galop
, its rapid notes audible through the mechanical clamor closer at hand. From below, he could hear the roaring of the furnaces, driving every step of cavalry boot and sweep of lace-fringed gown.
    “So I can hardly pay you, can I?” The manager pulled his hand back, letting the doctor’s head nod back onto his motionless chest. “Our contract is with him. Or rather, it was. His unfortunate demise would seem to nullify the relationship. Did he have heirs?”
    A shake of the head as Anton bit his lower lip. He was not surprised at what the manager, with the accounts book in a pocket of the swallow-tailed coat, told him now—he had expected as much, in his own sinking heart. But to hear it pronounced with gallows finality, that he would not receive his year’s wages, which
Herr Dr.
Pavel had always settled upon him as the midnight bells had struck—that he would go homeless and hungry, peering through shuttered shop windows for even the illusory hope of some new employment—he felt his hollow stomach clench at the thought of the empty, wintry streets that lay outside the Apollosaal.
    “If he had such, you might apply to them.” The manager drew on his gloves. “For what’s owed to you.”
    Anton said nothing. He knew no one owed him anything now. That was the way of this world.
    He watched the estates manager mount the creaking iron rungs, spiraling back up to the light and music above.
    Alone once more with his former master’s corpse, he leaned forward where he sat, arms across his knees, hands working themselves into a brooding knot. His own hunger he scarcelyminded. He was used to that. But Gisel had surely lost her place in the dowager’s service. If he were able to pay for even a few more weeks of the attic room’s shelter, he