Cold Stone & Ivy Book 2: The Crown Prince (The Empire of Steam)

by H. Leighton Dickson

  Her hands, her boots, her blood. The rivers of red now slowing, pooling, the heart coughing red into the cavity, rhythm stopping and starting and stopping and starting. There was a woman and his own heart thudded inside its prison.

  Stopping and starting like his world.

  He sank to his knees beside them.

  “Ivy?”

  “Can you touch her, Bastien? Because if you can, I need you to put your hands here. I need you to stop the bleeding.”

  The words like rainwater, impossible to catch.

  “Bastien? Can you? I have to get my medical bag.”

  “Ivy? How?”

  “Here. Do it. Now.”

  He pressed his hands into her ribs. She arched her back and threw back her head, trying to fill her lungs with anything but blood.

  Ivy.

  And suddenly, Christien was gone, leaving him with his whole world writhing on the floor.

  He wished he had breath to give her but his was gone, like the sunshine. Like hope and reason and daylight and love. Like night and winter and dark and cold. He couldn’t believe what was happening. It had the appearance of a dream. A slow, agonizing, distorted dream. A nightmare.

  What had he done?

  She grabbed his sleeves now, her boots scraping the floor, chest convulsing with spasms. He slipped one hand behind her head, leaned to press his forehead against hers, as if his very closeness could bring relief.

  He would be the death of her.

  “Ivy,” he said. “Ivy, look at me.”

  “Laury?” she gasped, blood bubbling at the corner of her mouth. “It hurts. Oh, it hurts…”

  Then I shall live at Seventh and haunt you forever.

  “Breathe,” he said. “Please breathe and look at me.”

  “It hurts…”

  “Look at me. Stop fighting and please look at me.”

  She did. And with it, her struggles quieted as she fell into the black abyss that was his eyes.

  “I have something for you, see?”

  He reached into his pocket, dug out the slip of paper. It was as thin as an eyelash now, and stained with soot. He could barely make it out.

  “1 Rue Victor Cousin, Paris. It’s for the Sorbonne, the university that accepts women. We were going to stop there before returning home but well, the living had other plans, didn’t they? They always do. Almost as bad as the dead, they are.”

  The paper froze in his fingers, disintegrating like ash and disappearing in a wisp.

  She smiled. Her lips were red as roses, stained with blood.

  “But I don’t want you to go, Ivy. I don’t want you to go. I know it’s a very good opportunity for you, and you would certainly get top marks and start a new life as a Girl Criminologist but Ivy, I don’t want you to go. I never did. I want you for myself but I’m a greedy man and I’ve been too afraid to ask. I was afraid you’d want Paris more than you’d want me so I never said anything but now I am, because I don’t want you to go.”

  She wheezed, her breath ragged and thin. He pulled closer still.

  “Ivy, I’m a fool. You’ve tried for so very long. You’ve given me chance after chance after chance and I’ve hidden from them like a coward. You were too alive for me. I’ve lived with death every minute of every day and the power of your life frightened me. But I’m not afraid anymore, I’m not afraid because if I am Death, then you are Life and the world needs you. I need you.”

  She was sinking into the floor. No struggles at all now. Her heart was barely beating.

  “I need your life. I need your courage and strength and your laughter and ingenuity. You make me think and you make me feel and I can’t imagine anything without you at the heart of it. In the Stallburg, I said I didn’t know about love but I lied because I know you and I love you and I don’t want you to go to Seventh, I want you to live.”

  She was slipping away, slipping, her eyes turning to glass. He pulled her closer.

  “I need you to live.” His chest was tight, his eyes stinging and tears gathered behind his lashes but they would not fall. They were like tar. “Please live, Ivy. Please, I need you to live.”

  She shuddered and he saw it, saw the confusion, the fight, the stubborn determination and a momentary flash of fear. It all stopped in an instant, along with her heart.

  I won’t be able to follow.

  “Move over,” said Christien, returning with the medical bag. “I need…”

  Even the single tear that had begun to fall stalled in its path along her cheek.

  She was standing in the deadspace above her body now, a mere vapour of white, turning in circles as if searching for the light.

  “Oh god,” said Christien. “Bastien...”

  She spied him kneeling beside her body and she opened her mouth, tried to speak. He watched the realization play out on her face and his walls came crashing down.

  As if from very far away and very long ago, Sophie began to speak.

  “Because I could not stop for Death…”

  There was nothing left inside him, save a very dark hole.

  “He kindly stopped for me.”

  A black hole.

  He staggered to his feet.

  “The Carriage held but just Ourselves…”

  The temperature in the Court Chapel plummeted and he turned.

  “Bastien, no.”

  “And Immortality.”

  He stormed toward the clockwork princess. Her father lunged but the Mad Lord swung an arm, sending the man backwards with a hail of ice pellets.

  “No, Bastien!”

  He caught her by the cabled throat, pushed her twenty feet backwards into the massive glass panes where the altar had been.

  “Nein!” barked Gisela. “Hör auf!”

  She scrambled after him but ice was racing up the windows, across the floors, forming a wall between them.

  “Kill me, Bruder!” wheezed Sophie. “Send me to the sweet beyond after your lover!”

  She placed her hands over his and closed her eyes, smiled like a child expecting a present on Christmas day.

  Ice crackled all around them as he took the temperature down, down, down in the chapel and he gripped her skull, pulling her forehead to his. Her squeal of delight died as her tongue froze to the roof of her mouth and her pasty complexion turned blue in a matter of seconds. Another sound arose from her throat, this time a scream, and it shattered the frost between them, drowned out only by the groaning of clockwork. The temperature dropped lower still until the air sizzled, burning the cables and causing the iron corset to buckle and crack. Wires snapped in her limbs and the room echoed with the squeal of collapsing metal. Suddenly, with the boom of cannons, the three massive windows shattered into a thousand pieces.

  Taking what was left of Sophie Friederike Dorothea Maria Josepha Archduchess von Habsburg with them.

  ***

  “Sophie!”

  The scream would have shattered windows, had there been any left. Empress Elizabeth collapsed to the floor as she lost her second child within a week. Gisela pulled her pistol and fired, but the muzzle was thick with ice and it exploded in her hand, clattering instead to the floor next to the Kaiser of Blood and Iron. He merely rocked back and forth, clutching his withered arm.

  Silhouetted in the beams of airship light, Bastien stood in the breach with his back to them all, greatcoat waving like a tattered flag on a battlefield. Soot rose and fell on the night wind and snow blew in as the Stahl Mädchen lowered herself to chapel height. Cannon ports glinted in the moonlight.

  The world was mad, Christien realized. It had simply taken him a few years to catch up.

  Through the rubble, Franz Joseph marched to his daughter’s side, face streaked with pinpricks of blood. Bastien’s spray of ice would have been like buckshot, biting his flesh like tiny needles.

  “Gisela, go!” he snapped. “Summon the Hussars! Summon Steam and Steel! Tell them to prepare their ships and train their cannons on the Chapel! We will destroy this creature once
and for all!”

  Gisela whirled and bolted toward the door but the walls were frozen and the door sealed shut. She pounded on it, began shouting instructions to the Hussars on the other side.

  The Emperor turned to his youngest.

  “Valerie! You know all the secret doors. Find one that is not ice, get out and get Taaffe, tell him to summon parliament and declare a state of emergency.”

  Valerie did not move, her eyes glued to the spot where her sister had shattered. There was nothing left, save a blast pattern that exposed the floor beneath the carpet.

  I’ll be left alone in this horrible place, she had said earlier. Alone.

  “Valerie! NOW!”

  She turned and raced toward the balcony steps, laid her hand on the railing when suddenly the entire staircase became a slick of ice. She glanced around, dashing toward the far end of the chapel, her footfalls echoing as she followed to its end.

  The Emperor swung around to face Bastien, slid the ceremonial sword from his hip.

  “We will kill you, creature,” he barked. “The power of God and might of the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire will send you and your brother to Hell!”

  “Hell?” came the hollow voice. It rang through the chapel like a bell. “Hell?”

  “Yes! You belong in Hell!”

  “Hel, Hades, Sheol, Nifilheim, Alvilág, Duzakh,” growled Sebastien. “I am Hell.”

  Slowly he turned his face, raised the blanket from his shoulders to form a hood. With the greatcoat in tatters and the eye sockets black as night, Christien realized that his brother no longer merely saw Death.

  He had become it.

  Franz Joseph raised the ceremonial sword and charged but his brother spun, catching it in both hands and ice travelled swiftly up the shining blade. The Emperor gritted his teeth as his hands, then arms, then shoulders began to shake. Finally, he roared with fury and released the hilt, stepping back and tucking his hands under his arms for warmth. Bastien turned and left him, carrying the sword by the blade.

  At least he hadn’t killed the Emperor, Christien thought. At least he hadn’t killed him.

  His brother knelt down now beside the woman he had loved. He stroked the wild hair from her face, ran his fingers along her cheek to her chin, bent down to kiss her forehead.

  “Skin,” he said with a voice that sounded like soot. “Marvelous soft.”

  Christien looked down at them both and he sighed, his own breath frosting in front of his face. Ivy Savage, bringer of chaos, daughter of calamity. She had once been his fiancé, then perhaps his only friend. He felt his throat grow tight. Odd. He’d never wept for anything before. Not his mother, certainly not his father, not his arm or his career or the bird he had found last summer. What a sad, miserable life if nothing mattered enough to weep its loss.

  Perhaps he was more machine than Sophie.

  He watched Gisela approach her father. She had to move carefully not to slip in this holy cavern of ice.

  “The airships are ready, Pappa,” she said. “But they won’t fire if you’re in the Chapel.”

  “They will fire if I order them to fire.”

  “And what if the creature does not die?”

  “Then we will have done our best duty to the Empire.” Franz Joseph turned to her. “But you know that. You are bound by honour and duty and holy Habsburg blood. You should have been Emperor, Gigi, not Rudy. You.”

  He kissed her forehead but she yelped as his lips bit her skin like frost.

  The temperature was plummeting once again.

  ***

  He couldn’t find her anywhere in the deadspace.

  Even her bones were empty, simple lengths of white on a carpet of black. The body was a shell, a vessel for the spirit and once the spirit was gone, it didn’t take long to lose heat on the road to dust. He tore the sleeves on the greatcoat, picked up the Emperor’s sword.

  “No, Bastien! You’re not going—”

  He waved a hand and a wall of ice rose up between himself and his brother. In fact, he thought, keep it going, and the ice grew up all around them, walls and ceiling surrounding he and Ivy and the casket of the Crown Prince. Just like the Bergl palais. A cave of ice within a cavern of ice. The holy of holies.

  In its refracting, distorted surface, he could see faces, otherworldly faces frozen in death. For the first time, he realized that the ice wasn’t ice, and the frost wasn’t frost but spirits from beyond this earth, the manifestations of those who called no place home.

  A wall of the dead, creating a barrier between the world of the living and that of the dead. The deadwall.

  Christien was shouting and pounding but the sounds were as distorted as his face. Odd. He never thought his brother cared and he felt a pang of guilt. These last days had been hard on his brother, his many wounds not yet healed. Christien was far too young to die like this, following him from frost to fire and back again. He would try to set it right before the end, but had little faith that it would take.

  He looked back at Ivy. Her eyes were blank, empty and he reached over to close them. It was like closing the windows on an abandoned house. Seventh was an abandoned house. Frankow and his father had created him there.

  I shall live at Seventh and haunt you forever.

  That was not acceptable. There was only one way to prevent it now.

  He lifted the rings, the ones belonging to Rudolf and Mary, placed them on each of her eyes like the coins from long ago. Reached for the ceremonial sword, dragging the point of the blade across his forearms and the bandages fell away like orange peels. The flesh beneath was puckered and raw, but it wouldn’t be around for much longer, he knew, and he sliced the skin from wrist to elbow, pleased at the welling of the red. No ligaturae spiratus this time. He wasn’t binding anything. No, his prayers would be of a different sort entirely.

  His blood dripped into a pool on the carpet and he lifted Arclight from around his neck, dipped first her then her sister into the pool. He laid a hand on Ivy’s chest, moved his fingers to find the wound and his throat tightened. He had never touched her. In all the months he had known her, he had never touched her. He had wanted to but he never had. Two kisses and that was all and now, his hands on her dead body and he couldn’t even weep, for his tears were like tar. He was as dead as she.

  But he would change that.

  He began to pray, the Latin words turning to frost even as they left his mouth.

  He placed Ghostlight – beautiful glittering Ghostlight, his lover, his mistress– over the wound. Clutched Arclight – elusive, wicked Arclight, his siren, his destruction – in his left hand, wrapping the chain around his palm.

  He lifted the Emperor’s sword, placed the tip under his own heart, and with a prayer in Latin, slid it home.

  ***

  “Bastien!” Christien shouted, knowing what was coming long before he saw it, knowing also that it was too late. Through the distorted ice, he saw the greatcoat bulge as the sword came through, and he closed his eyes, wondering at the madness of the last few days. The things he had seen, the things he had learned. He would not be the same person, if he lived.

  He turned and sagged with his back against the ice cave in the Court Chapel of the Hofburg. His life was absurd. He should have just moved in to Hollbrook, taken a little job maybe as a hospital orderly or a chemist or menswear salesman at Harrod’s. Hell, he could even have worked as mad Dr. Jekyll’s assistant next door. Didn’t matter now. He wouldn’t be getting out of this alive.

  Elizabeth was being ushered to the far end of the chapel by her husband while Gisela helped a stunned Wilhelm to his feet. Wind whipped in through the shattered windows and beyond them, he could see the Stahl Mädchen’s propellers working against each other to keep her hovering and level. He could see the torches lighting up the ports. Death by cannonball. Not a bad way to go, all things considered.

  He just wished he had some of that sweet Austrian white or dry red to go along with it.

  He could hear bootsteps and as i
f on cue, Valerie marched back into the chapel, a troop of human and Silver Hussars at her heel. He didn’t move. They could bloody well shoot him where he sat if they wanted to.

  Valerie spied him. He could see her thinking, weighing her options like the Habsburg she was. She pointed an Imperial finger.

  “Bring him,” she said. “The Chapel must be empty before the barrage begins.”

  Two soldiers jogged over, grabbed him by his arms and hauled him to his feet.

  ***

  Wave after wave as his body rebelled. It didn’t want to die. Oddly enough, it never did and the pain almost overcame him with its crippling poison and its fear. His hands were slippery now as he dragged the sword out of his body, let it clatter to the floor. Arclight. He needed Arclight. She had fallen from his hand and was sitting in a pool of Ivy’s blood. His fingers fumbled as they tried to pick her up. He was tired.

  He wanted to close his eyes. He would be lost if he closed his eyes.

  And so would she. Not acceptable.

  He called the locket and she spun patterns in the blood so he could see. His fingers found her, gathered her into his palm and lifted her up to the wound where his heart still pumped blood like a fountain.

  He was tired.

  He held both lockets out now in the palms of his hands, both covered in blood. He began to pray, waiting for the flash of colour, the leap of light, telling him that his prayers weren’t in vain. Telling him he would not fail because deep down, he knew he had.

  He had failed Ivy, he had failed Christien, he had failed his uncle and he had failed himself. He had failed everyone who had ever put their hope or trust in him but truth be told, there weren’t all that many. His dogs, at least, but they had Rupert.

  He closed his eyes tightly now, forcing his lips to move as he prayed with all of his dying heart in Latin. Snow and ice and frost fell to the floor like flakes on a winter night.

  He prayed until his heart stopped beating and even as he fell forward beside her, he prayed. He prayed until there was nothing left in his heart, mind, soul or strength and there was little else to be done after that.