The Boneshaker (31 page)

Ping!...Ping,ping,ping,ping!

He turned to stare over his shoulder at the little tableau in the corner as the second pot lifted and the drummer shaped like Acquetus began to swing his arms.

"I told you they would come," he said.

Natalie flung herself at him. "How do you stop the gingerfoot?"

"You can't." Limberleg ran a gloved hand through his wild red and gray hair. It parted for his fingers like seaweed waving in a current. Behind him, the third pot tilted back and the little flute player started its reedy piping.
"You can't," he said again as the fourth pot began to cant backwards, revealing a tiny, bald Argonault. The miserable strings began to wail.

He twisted his mouth into another one of his thin, humorless smiles and looked at Tom. "You should thank me, old man, for putting this town out of its misery. There are worse ways to die. I know what else walks your roads around here, and the gingerfoot is definitely the better way to go."

Tom frowned. "What's that mean, you old liar?" For the first time, he actually sounded unnerved.

"There has to be a way!" Natalie insisted.

"I tell you, there isn't." He raised a hand. "It's been set into motion, and now it will continue on its own, unendingly."

"Perpetual motion," she whispered. Limberleg nodded with a humorless smile.

Tom put a hand on her shoulder. "We got to get out of here, Natalie. They're coming, and
he
ain't gonna tell us anyhow. Ain't a single reason why he would."

Natalie put her shaking hands in her pockets. In the left one, she found the cards the waxwork fortuneteller had given her on the first day of the fair.

All things are either good or bad by comparison,
the sibyl had said. Natalie hadn't quite known what to make of that. Compared to Jake Limberleg, obviously lots of people were good, or at least
better.
Maybe Phemonoe had only meant what the doctor had just said to Tom: that there were also lots of worse things out there in the world.

But it could mean something else, too.

Hadn't he told the sibyl to answer Natalie? Hadn't he invited them into his wagon only minutes ago? Hadn't he come up with rules to try to keep the Paragons under control?

Maybe the sibyl had meant for Natalie to understand that nothing and nobody was all bad or all good. Maybe, just maybe, as frightening as Jake Limberleg was, he still had some good in him.

"Yes, he will," Natalie said slowly, raising her eyes to look at the doctor who sat glowering back at her. "I think he will."

But Natalie didn't know if she really believed it, or what to believe at all—if anything could be counted on ever again, or whether her whole world was really as twisted and strange a place as the last three days seemed to make it out to be.

Everything had changed.

Even her brilliant father, her mother who loved to explain things, her brother ... she couldn't count on any of them, not right now, not at this moment, not facing the man with the demon hands in his wagon full of clockwork.

Even I've changed,
she realized. And maybe, just maybe, it was okay that she couldn't count on her family right now.

They'll have to count on me.

The automata burst into motion around them. Tom pressed his hands to his ears as though his head would explode. Miranda cried out but forced herself to keep her
eyes on the alley. Jake Limberleg exhaled a slow, tired sigh. Suddenly he looked much older.

Tom tugged at Natalie's arm. "Come on!"

"No." She stood beside the chair and, struggling to ignore the cacophony, she looked Jake Limberleg straight in the eyes.

She forced all the anger to drain from her face, all the fury and fear, and made herself believe she could fill the empty space with confidence, the way Old Tom Guyot had taught her.

It was hard. This wasn't Mrs. Byron, or George Sills, or even strange Mr. Coffrett. This was a man who'd trafficked with the Devil, who'd commanded demons, who'd let evil walk beside him for a very long time. His hands were not his own, and who knew if he had any kind of a soul left at all.

But, when it came down to it, Jake Limberleg still wasn't a demon himself. No matter what kind of man he was, no matter what the sibyl said about matter and spirit, he was still just a man. Long, long ago, he might even have been a good man. He had once wanted to do good things in the world. That had to count a little, at least.

Limberleg's eyes narrowed, and suspicion lanced his features. Natalie wanted to look away, wanted more than anything to flee with Tom and Miranda, to escape these awful, clicking clockwork nightmares ... to get far, far away from those awful hands....

Hands are skin and bone, mostly. Some are human; some are not. They're still only hands.

Natalie pushed the memory of the demon hands down into the deepest, darkest cabinet of her mind and locked the door. She forced herself to think of the young doctor Bellinspire whose story had come to her in the cell-like room next door, and she slid her small hand into Jake Limberleg's leather-clad palm.

Tension speared through the doctor and fought battles on his face. The sounds of gears and moving limbs vaulted to a fever pitch, but there was silence in the space between the two of them. The silence stretched. And then something happened.

"First," he murmured, "
do no harm.
" Jake Limberleg smiled. It was a real smile, a gentle smile. There was hope in it.

"There might be a way," he whispered, so quietly Natalie had to lean close to hear. "But you'll only have one chance."

Then, abruptly, his fingers twitched. He jerked his hand away and stared down at it with something awful waking on his face. He leaped to his feet.

For a moment Limberleg had forgotten that the hands weren't his.

"Natalie"—his fingers flew over the buttons at his wrist—"you've got to destroy the Four. They are his instruments—his devices...." His face went red, then drained dead white as he tried to force the hands still, but they flicked the buttons open easily and began peeling back the leather. "If you can find a way to break them, you might break what they've—get out," he snarled, fighting to keep the gloves where they were,
with hands that would not obey him. "Get out! Take those with you!" He kicked a foot at the four automata, still wringing awful noises from their tiny instruments, as the seams of the leather fingers began to split.

But Natalie could only stare at the things emerging from the ruined gloves. At the window, Miranda whimpered, but kept her eyes on the path outside.

The gloves fell to the floor. The demon hands reached up for Jake Limberleg's throat.

"Natalie, go!" She barely heard him shouting to her, so mesmerized was she by those horrible fingers of bone and sinew and calcified gear. Then Tom's voice shook her out of her stupor: "Natalie!"

Tom reached for Limberleg's wrists, trying to pull the demon hands away. "Are you crazy, old man?" Limberleg howled, flailing a foot at Tom to keep him back. "Natalie!
Move!
"

She ducked past the struggling Jake Limberleg to sweep the automata up in her arms. "Then what? Jake!
Then what?
"

"Go to—" The first spidery hand closed around his neck, and then the next, the too-long fingers wrapping with horrid ease all the way around his throat. Limberleg flung his body sideways, backwards, anywhere he could, but there was no stopping those uncanny hands as they began to squeeze. He grunted something that might have been an order or a plea.

"
No!
" she screamed.

Then Tom grabbed her around the waist and flung her outside, where she landed next to a trembling Miranda Porter. Tom stumbled down the stairs after them.

"No," Natalie sobbed. "He tried to help us—he tried to—we can't leave him! We have to save him!"

The wagon shook.

"Natalie, we got to save the town," Tom said shortly. "We got to save your mama, honey. We got to do that first. Old Jake wanted us to undo what he did. You saw he wanted us to do that, didn't you? Because you made him see, Natalie. You made him believe he could still do good. Now we got to go. They're coming for us. We got to get out of the fair!"

Fair, not fair ... Natalie allowed herself to be drawn, sobbing, away from the quaking wagon. It wasn't fair. But Tom was right.

"This way," Miranda said shakily, running toward the end of the alley. Natalie followed blindly. They turned left, right, then left between tents and booths and dark pavilions.... Miranda stopped short and turned. She looked confused. "Should've gone right."

They backtracked and went the opposite way. "Are you sure?" Natalie asked. Silly question. How could anyone be sure of anything in this place?

Miranda stopped in her tracks but didn't answer. She looked straight up.

"Did you see that?" she whispered.

"What?" Tom asked.

"It saw us, I'm sure," Miranda said softly. "It knows where we are." Natalie's stomach lurched. She stared up at the thin, dark lines stretched like a web overhead.

Then they heard it: a soft jingle of bells.

"It'll lead the Paragons right to us!" Natalie hissed. "Run!"

"No, wait," Miranda said. "We can cut through here."

Natalie followed her gaze up to the sign over the entrance to the tent that Miranda was ducking into:
CABINET OF CURIOSITIES
. She took a breath and followed Tom and Miranda into the darkness.

Tom lowered the canvas carefully back into place behind them so it wouldn't give them away. With a little snap, a spark flicked to life between his fingers. The tiny light of the match reflected off a dozen smooth surfaces.

"What is this place?" Miranda whispered.

"Looks like some kind of odd museum," Tom said, glancing into the nearest display case. "Got a skull with horns in here."

"What are we going to do with these?" Natalie asked. Her voice sounded so much thinner and shakier than usual. The clockwork figures in her arms were making her feel sick to her stomach. She didn't know whether it was from nerves or from the simple fact of being so close to machines that didn't answer to the laws of life.

"Not sure, darlin'. Break 'em somehow."

"How do we break machines that can go on forever?" Miranda's voice whispered.

Natalie licked her lips. "That day we saw the miniature

She took a breath and followed Tom and Miranda into the darkness.

harlequin, Dr. Limberleg said it would go on until something stopped it by force. So maybe they can be stopped ... but how on earth can we ... when the thing that's moving them is ... is ... the Devil?"

"Well, that's something, anyway," Tom said. "We know at least one force that can act on 'em." He looked doubtful, but it might only have been the shadows from the light of the match on his lined cheeks.

They fell into single file with Tom in the lead, lighting one match after another. The aisles between the cases were narrow enough that they caught glimpses of their contents in the flares of light.

A twisted little tree bent under the weight of flickering light bulbs rather than fruit. A miniature castle made entirely of glittering sewing needles. A collection of butterflies and moths on pins with wings that looked like carnival masks. A display of four stuffed and mounted cats: a tabby, a ginger, a black, and a Siamese ... each with a pair of furry wings sprouting from just behind its front limbs. One case held a perfect model of the fair, complete with tiny bottles and strings of minute light bulbs. The miniature One-Man Band and harlequin were both there, moving about the little walkways, along with Mr. Dalliot in the Dispensary and the army of Dalliot look-alikes who seemed to run everything else.

Natalie stopped short at a display on a table. "Tom?" He lit a fresh match and raised it to illuminate a grouping of pictures labeled
THE TRAVELS OF DR. LIMBERLEG AND COMPANY.

"I know that place." Natalie stared at a framed daguerreotype. It looked different with whole buildings rather than crumbling façades, but it was unmistakably a picture of the crossroads outside Arcane.

With a sudden lurch, it all came together: the telegraph, the diary, Natalie tripping over the squat, round green bottle at the dusty junction. The string of words on the label, and on the prescription card, and spoken like an incantation in a wagon full of clockwork. The round, green bottle in Charlie's hand. The staggering, illusory figures that had surrounded Simon Coffrett as Natalie had seen him stride through the Old Village in her strange vision days before.

"
And the ones who could still walk flung themselves about like the clumsiest of machines,
" Natalie whispered. "The gingerfoot! That's what happened to the Old Village. Remember what he said? You can't balance, can't walk ... you drag yourself around, just like that old diary said—"

"But how can it have been going on so long?" Miranda protested. "You said that was before the war, and that's—"

"Shhh," Tom whispered. Somewhere in the darkness overhead and outside, they heard bells. The match went out in Tom's fingers. He lit another with a snap and a sizzle. "That old Quinn's looking for us. Got to keep moving."