Clockwork Angels: The Novel by Kevin J. & Peart Anderson Page B

said. “Isn’t our show enough?”
    Afraid he had offended her, Owen hurried into the carnival grounds.
    Inside, the noise and energy was like a symphony. He walked past game booths crowded with eager players. A wizened carny with a liver-spotted scalp hunched over three inverted bowls, under one of which he had placed a small ball. Though the old man looked doddering and feeble, he switched the bowls around, reshifting their positions while chattering and wheezing to distract the observers. “Big money,” he said with a cackle. “Big money!” He always managed to trick the observers into guessing the wrong bowl, and he pocketed their bets.
    In another game booth, a thin woman spun an upright clockwork wheel with colored segments; players tossed darts and tried to hit winning patches. At yet another game, young men threw balls and tried to knock down a surprisingly persistent pyramid of beakers.
    He heard loud music and saw three clowns in colorful garb and painted with extravagant tattoos playing an off-key rendition of “The Anarchist’s March.” The clowns clashed cymbals with a foot pedal, banged the sides of a drum, and tooted on a horn in raucous demon music, which was appropriate for the villain who tried to disrupt the Stability of their lives. The crowd reacted with disturbed laughter.
    A bronze-skinned strongman wearing only a loincloth flexed his biceps, each of which was larger than Owen’s head. The strongman squatted down and amazed the crowd by lifting a barbell laden with weights the size of a steamliner’s steel wheel. The strongman raised the weight over his head and stood, straining with the effort until it looked as if his muscles would burst free from his arms like severed fan belts. Exhausted, he dropped the weight with such a crash that it left divots in the ground. The strongman reeled, disoriented, and Owen was convinced his effort was not an act.

    A handsome young man with dark hair and dark eyes pranced along with a dancer’s gait; he removed a packet from his pantaloons, dumped a sparkling blue powder into his mouth, then pressed his lips together. His cheeks bulged, making him look like a misbehaving child holding his breath; his eyes widened and watered, and at last he coughed out a gout of blue-green flame. Afterward, he burped with just a little flash of fire, wiped his mouth, and stepped back with a grin for the astonished audience.
    Owen had never heard so much laughter and hubbub in his life. Young couples walked arm in arm. Parents brought their children. He saw burnished copper, colored glass, painted metal; he heard the hiss of steam, saw a billow of smoke, all part of the sensory show.
    As he walked along, buffeted by sights and sensations, a tinny voice caught his attention, “What does the future hold for you, young man?”
    He turned to see a windowed booth painted the color of the ripest red apple; inside sat the clockwork figure of an old woman. The sign said, Gypsy Fortune Teller . She wore a patchwork dress, and her mechanical hands were covered with gloves, so as to seem more human; her head looked like a shriveled old crone’s, a dried-apple doll with gray-blue hair tied back in a bun. In precisely the same voice—no doubt words recorded on an engraved metal sound spool—the clockwork contraption repeated, “What does the future hold for you, young man?”
    He looked around but saw no one else nearby. She had to be talking to him. A small slot invited him to insert a coin; how could he not do so?
    He gave her one of his coins, and the fortune-teller automaton did not complain, nor did she make change. He turned the metal key on the side of the booth, clicking and clicking until the spring was tight. As the key whirred and the gears turned, the fortune teller’s hydraulic hands jerkily gathered cards from a thick tarot deck spread out there. She lifted the deck, shuffled the cards, fumbled them into place for her reading.
    “Justice against the Hanged Man,”