Alice tried to shout something at Ivana, but she was too out of breath to make more than a squeak. Gavin was equally at a loss.
“Do… something… ,” Alice panted.
Gavin aimed one of his wristbands at Ivana and triggered the polaretic magnetized pulsation device he had built only that afternoon. A gear shot from it and flicked straight at Ivana, but they were well over twenty yards away, and by the time the gear crossed the intervening distance, the automaton had swung the iron gates shut and the gear bounced off the bars. Ivana never even noticed. The automaton went to a guard box just inside the gates and stopped moving.
Alice managed a final run up to the gates with her parasol, her loose hair streaming out behind her. For an insane moment, Gavin thought of Joan of Arc attacking an English castle. She reached the gates, grabbed one of the bars with her gauntleted hand, and jumped back with a yelp. Gavin summoned the strength to hurry over.
“An electric field?” he asked.
“I believe so.” She shook out her hand. “Godd— Good heavens, Gavin. It’s our fault. If we hadn’t argued with Feng, he would have stayed with us and… Oh, I don’t know what to do.”
“Peasants do not approach the gate,” the automaton said, coming out of its box. “Peasants go to the rear for deliveries. Remove yourselves!”
Gavin stepped back, partly in surprise and partly to avoid brushing against the electrified gate. “It speaks English?”
“I speak a number of languages, peasant!” said the automaton. “Go around to the back!”
“Who is Ivana Gonta?” Alice asked.
“One of several members of the Gonta-Zalizniak collective family. Do you have a delivery for her?”
“Yes.” She held up her parasol. “Special order.”
“Go around to the back and wait for a proper hour. Your package will be admitted. You will not.”
“It’s not going to let us in,” Gavin murmured. “Can we get over, do you think?”
They both eyed the wall. It was at least eighteen feet high, studded with gargoyles, and likely contained a number of nasty surprises. All they had with them was a broken electrical parasol, a spider gauntlet that cured plague, a glass cutlass, and a set of wristbands Gavin had tested only sporadically. Although the parasol had proven marvelously effective, they had still severely underestimated the power of the local clockworkers. Meanwhile, Feng was inside the place, enduring heaven only knew what. Gavin thought of Charlie’s bare brain and his hands chilled at the thought of his friend Feng in the hands of someone with the intelligence to perform such a procedure and who referred to human beings as meat. He wanted to find a way to storm the gates, flatten the automaton guard, and force Ivana to release Feng, but he couldn’t think of a way to accomplish any of it. He turned helplessly to Alice. She set her mouth.
“We have to leave and come back,” she said firmly. “With more tools and lots of help.”
“The Gontas and Zalizniaks aren’t exactly a family, strictly speaking, strictly speaking,” Harry said. “They are a… collection, really.”
“Collection,” Gavin said. “What does that mean?”
Harry puffed on his cigar and cast a sidelong look at Alice. They were talking in what was euphemistically referred to as the Black Tent, though it was neither black nor a tent. It was actually a boxcar outfitted as a laboratory, with tools hanging on the walls, a portable forge heating up one corner, and half-finished machines littering the tables that lined the walls. It belonged to Dodd, who wasn’t a clockworker but who did have enough of a facility with machines to repair or even build basic clockwork designs, though nothing on the level that Alice could do. It was here that he had tinkered together the windup toys for Gavin and Tom when they were children, visiting the circus with Captain Naismith. The place smelled of machine oil, bitter coal smoke, and metal shavings, and made Gavin think of a time when he was still learning his way around an airship. Dodd called it the Black Tent because the work area had once been a blacksmith’s tent. When the circus became wealthy enough, Dodd had bought a boxcar for everything, but the original name had stuck.
Gavin was feeling restless again, and as happened on the train in Dodd’s car when he guarded Alice’s sleep, his hands went to work without him. A spool of Dr. Clef’s alloy sat in his lap. He wound more of it and snipped rings free of the dowel. He had quite a collection now.
Harry continued to hesitate. Finally Alice spoke up. “If you’re worrying about offending my delicate sensibilities, Mr. Burks, please stop. We don’t have time for nonsense. You must speak plainly.”
The rotund man moved his cigar to the other side of his mouth. “Very well, very well.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t know how much Ukrainian history you know—”
“Maksym Zalizniak was a Cossack who rose up at an outbreak of the clockwork plague,” Alice said crisply. “He used Ivan Gonta and other powerful clockworkers to construct machines of war that forced out the Russians and the Poles—and then the Jews and the Catholics—so they could take back Ukraine and form their own empire. Get on with it.”
“Yes, well,” Harry said, “it didn’t stop there, of course. The Zalizniak clan took the left bank, or western half, of Kiev and Ukraine, while the Gonta clan took the right, or east. At first they got along very well, but things devolved very quickly, very quickly. Cossacks fight as a way of life, you see, and once they didn’t have the Russians and Poles to kick around anymore, they turned inward. The two clans bickered and sniped and fought all the time, all the time, their clockworkers ran rampant, and the people of Kiev were caught in the middle. They especially fought over the dam—and the power it generates.”
“But the house we saw had the two Cyrillic letters in the gate,” Gavin said. “A g and a z. They seem to be getting along fine now.”
“That’s the mystery,” Harry said. “Clockworkers don’t cooperate. Fifty or sixty years ago, the Gontas smashed the Zalizniaks flat, but instead of killing their rivals, they merged with them. How, no one knows, no one knows. Now, instead of having two collective families, they have just one, just one.”
“How do you get a family of clockworkers?” Alice said. “They don’t… they can’t…”
Gavin held his face impassive over the growing net of rings. He knew very well what Alice was trying not to say, that clockworkers, including him, died within three years of contracting the plague. Family relationships were cut unfortunately short. A sudden longing to see his own children filled him, made all the worse for the fact that he knew it could never come to pass, and he had to turn his face away for a moment to get himself under control. China. China would have the cure, if only they could get there.
“That’s the delicate part.” Harry coughed and reddened. “You see, the Gonta-Zalizniaks operate on a process of… assimilation.”