Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables by Stephen L. Antczak, James C. Bassett Read Free Book Online

and it was as if his mother were there again, in some small way. The fear receded.
That was the past and this is the present. If she were going to kill me, she would have done it by now.
    “What’s your price, then?” he asked. “My soul? I’ll give you that, if you want.”
    Baba Yaga backed away a little, then chortled. “Nice try, boy. We both know your soul belongs to someone else and isn’t yours to bargain with.”
    Vasyl spread his hands. “Then what?”
    “My biggest fear, boy, is that while I’m putting together your precious mechanical, my poor cottage will fall to ruin.”
    Vasyl looked around the filthy kitchen. “Er…I don’t understand what you’re asking.”
    “Keep house for me while I work,” Baba Yaga clarified. “Today you will clean this room. And if you don’t meet my standards, it’ll be more than your head on my table.”
    Vasyl remembered the bone fence outside and swallowed. “All right. I only have three days before—”
    Baba Yaga waved this away. “Do you know what a tesseract is, boy?”
    “No.”
    “Suffice it to say that we will have sufficient time inside this cottage. Let’s both begin.” She stalked out of the room through a door Vasyl hadn’t noticed before and slammed it shut.
    Vasyl looked around the harshly lit, windowless kitchen and its coating of grime. He sighed heavily from his chair, shrugged out of his tinker’s pack, and opened it.
    “You know you’re screwed, right?” said Maroushka the cat.
    Vasyl’s hands jerked, and the pack rattled. “What—?”
    “Screwed,” Maroushka repeated from the table. “It means treated unfairly or harshly.”
    Vasyl scrambled to regain his equilibrium. Mechanicals didn’t talk. Ever. Therefore the cat wasn’t a mechanical, or Baba Yaga could work real miracles.
    “I—I know what I’m doing,” Vasyl replied shortly.
    “
I—I know what I’m doing,
” Maroushka repeated in an exact replica of Vasyl’s voice, and Vasyl jumped again. “They all say that.”
    “I have help. I wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t.”
    “Sure.” Maroushka yawned, exposing brass fangs and a rubbery tongue. “All the girls have help, right up until the moment she’s adding their bones to the fence.”
    “I’m not a girl. Or a boy. I’m a man.”
    “To her, anyone under a thousand years old is a baby, and everyone tastes the same in a stewpot. Look, the stories only talk about the two or three who get away, never the eight or nine hundred who become goulash. So you’re dead.”
    “Probably.” Vasyl had had enough shocks for the day and found himself growing tired of them. “I have work to do.”
    Baba Yaga’s door shook with thuds and clanks, and once Vasyl thought he heard a muffled scream. He reopened his pack.
    “She’ll be back faster than you think,” Maroushka said, “and this place had better be cleaner than a virgin’s bathtub.”
    “Do you think for yourself?” Vasyl extracted a can with a spout on it from the pack.
    Maroushka stared at him with hard green eyes. “That’s a rude question.”
    “But do you?”
    “Yeah.” Maroushka sniffed. “Not that the answer means anything.”
    “Because you could be programmed to say that,” Vasyl finished.
    Maroushka licked one paw. “How do we know that anyone really thinks? For all you know, all the people in the world are mechanicals masquerading as people and you’re the only real human in it.”
    “That would awfully self-centered.” Vasyl unscrewed the lid on the spout and pulled out his pocketknife. “Why should the entire universe revolve around me?”
    “You’re
here
, aren’t you? In the cottage of the world’s most powerful crafter and witch in a cottage that exists partly outside time. That’s major shit. Of course you’re the center.”
    “Everything is the center in an infinite universe,” Vasyl countered, “so technically you’re right.”
    “Do
you
think for yourself?”
    “Of course I do. I’m a human