Lars saw that the Countess was looking at him expectantly. This was when he fully realized just how difficult it would be to extract himself from the encircling furniture. He blew out a breath, took a deep drink, and sat back.
“It... It’s not that I don’t want to,” he found that this discussion was easier if he kept his eyes focused on the wineglass in his hand. “I’d... kind of planned on it. But... do you remember Doktor Spün and his Cylinder of Touch[37]?”
Payne nodded. Hiring Doktor Spün had been one of his rare personnel mistakes. His firing had been cathartic however, even if it had taken awhile to put out.
“That damned thing was beautiful. You wanted to touch it. To feel it. I wanted to. But I knew—I knew that it was a bad idea. I had that walking into a bad town feeling. I told you at the time, remember?”
He took another sip of wine, and finally raised his eyes to Payne’s. “I... I get the same feeling from Agatha. I want to touch her. Red fire, I want to... but, then I get the feeling that if I get too close, there’s going to be trouble.”
Payne slowly sat back, and thoughtfully poured the young man another glass of wine. He then turned to the Countess. “I’ve seen Moxana’s game. I can’t argue with that.”
Marie regarded Lars and slowly tapped her chin. “You’ve never... dallied with a girl possessed of the Spark, have you?”
Lars looked surprised. “No, m’lady. All the town girls I...” he paused, “—talk to, are regular folk. There’s never been any available ma—uh—gifted ladies with the show.” He thought about this. “You think that’s it?”
Payne shrugged. “Only an idiot would think about knowingly involving himself with a woman with the Spark, —if he planned to take advantage of her.”
“I wasn’t—!”
Payne held up a hand. “Neither one of us thinks you’re that foolish, my boy. But wooing even a normal lady is not something a fellow should do lightly. You have a finely tuned sense of danger. I think it only natural that this would be a situation that would cause it to sit up and start screaming.”
Lars thoughtfully took a drink. “I think I see what you mean, sir.”
Payne nodded. “Now, both the Countess and I think you an honorable person.” Marie cleared her throat. Payne continued smoothly “—In your own way. Which is why, at the very least, you should stop giving her these mixed signals. It’s not fair to Agatha. Settle it one way or the other before she gets so wound up that she dismantles half my circus.”
Lars sat back, and slowly sipped his wine. What he was afraid of was the unknown. The mysterious thing that reached out from behind your back and grabbed you.
When he knew what a particular danger was, Lars was surprisingly good at dealing with it. There was the screaming afterwards, of course, but no one is perfect.
Another thing Lars was good at, was talking to women. Now in this case, he was dealing with an infatuated, naïve, and inexperienced woman who could literally warp the laws of nature and probably turn him into a carrot if he did her wrong.
But when he thought of it that way, it began to seem like an interesting challenge...
There had been a thunderstorm the night before, leaving the air cool and crisp, and putting a sparkle on the leaves of all the trees.
The circus was currently parked next to the map dot that was known to the locals as the village of Borlax. The local solstice stock fair was winding up, tonight would be the last show and tomorrow the circus would be back on the road. Today, however, the locals were engaged in a final frenzy of deal making that involved more histrionics and high drama than the actors dished out in a month. Thus, the troupe was enjoying a little extra free time.
Many were critiquing the locals’ use of hyperbole and invective. Rivet and Captain Kadiiski were replacing a broken wheel on one of the caravan wagons. Agatha was examining a small device she had discovered hidden in the back of her wagon. It was a complicated little hand-cranked thing of gears and spheres within spheres. It looked like it should produce music of some kind, but she couldn’t figure out how it worked.
Suddenly she released a catch, there was a small click, and a gear slid into place. She gave a satisfied grin and blew a lock of hair out of her eyes.
At that moment, Dame Ædith strolled over. “Good day to you, Miss Clay. If I may take a moment of your time?”
Agatha nodded. “Is everything satisfactory?” The vampyre hunter had asked Agatha to do some minor repairs upon her wagon.
The older woman paused, and marveled at the small device in Agatha’s hand. Agatha graciously passed it over and wiped her hands on a square of rag. “Ah, that is the thing,” Ædith continued. “It rides right smoothly, and the brakes are now most effective...” Absent-mindedly, she spun the crank on the device and gave a small delighted smile as a number of spheres spun and twisted about each other, accompanied by a barely heard high-pitched twittering.
“...But?” Agatha interjected.
Dame Ædith kept spinning the crank, but frowned. “But now the accursed thing doth make this most vexatious clicking noise.”
Agatha looked surprised. “Clicking noise?”
“Aye, and a right loud one too. I thought—” What she thought was never to be revealed, as at that moment, a large brown bat cannoned into her hat, and with a great deal of flapping and squeaking, tried to climb under it. Dame Ædith shrieked and batted ineffectually at the creature, in the process throwing the device into the air. Agatha caught it before it crashed to the ground. As she did so, she saw that there was a faded paper label stuck to the bottom, which she had neglected to examine. It read “Bat Summoning Engine.” Under this, in a crabbed hand, someone had added the notation; “excessively effective.”
She looked up. The bat was clinging to Dame Ædith’s hat, even though the woman was now waving it about frantically trying to dislodge the creature. Agatha surreptitiously slipped the device into a tool bag and said brightly, “I’ll just go take a look, shall I?”
Dame Ædith’s wagon was as garishly decorated as any of the others, but when you got close enough, it became evident that the décor consisted of holy symbols. Hundreds of them, fitted together chock-a-block, forming an intricate pattern that drew spiritual comfort from hundreds of different faiths and belief systems, in no evident order of precedence.
The roof bristled with totems, icons, spirit flags and ætheric antennae constructed of everything from precious metals to bones and seashells. Signs covered the sides, promising cures for anemia, sleepwalking and a “fear of garlic.” Agatha had noted that the exact nature of the “cure” was never specified.
Whenever the wagon moved, an ingenious gear system automatically rotated a plethora of prayer wheels and played simple melodies upon several gongs and chimes. There was also a fat copper chain that dragged along behind, because, Agatha had been informed, Dame Ædith’s cart was struck by lightning on an average of once a month. A fact the vampyre hunter found “statistically inconvenient.” Privately, Agatha attributed this to the excessive amount of metal used in the decorations.
Whenever the cart moved, even over the sound of the gongs and chimes, there was an excessively loud clacking sound. Agatha frowned.
Dame Ædith stomped over as Agatha was finishing a test run of the wagon. The bat clung to her hat and appeared to have fallen asleep. It was apparent that she had given up trying to dislodge it, and was now determined to ignore it.
“That’s it,” Dame Ædith said triumphantly. “Ever since thou worked upon it, it hath been doing that, and ’tis beginning to drive me unto the brink of madness.”
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