Stormbringer

by Shannon Delany

  “… activates the valves and pistons that grant it movement.”

  “So when it sits more steam must be released to depressurize the system appropriately.”

  “True, true. You have a fine mind for mechanics. You could create such a thing for yourself,” he chuckled. He closed the door.

  “No. Not within my realm. And why did you build the beast?” he asked, straightening. “It takes more than the interest born of a hobby to create something of this scope.”

  The inventor shrugged. “Truth be told, there is little profit to be made in my regular ventures as a printer and seller of books. So I thought: what if I created a toy for children before Christmas—now that celebrating the holiday with gift-giving is rising in popularity. Every girl wants a doll and every boy wants a dog … what if I combine those dreams and provide them with the best of both worlds? A walking doll of a dog?”

  Now he was the one who cocked his head and looked at the mechanical beast before him. “It would be a smaller model, of course. With new safety protocols in place to regulate the temperature of the heart and ribs. And girls would want something prettier. More delicate, don’t you suppose?”

  “Yes. So I would suppose. And after designing an army of doggy dollies for Christmas, what next?”

  The man shrugged. “Who can predict? The science behind such a thing is applicable to many avenues of life—to a multitude of technologies. Why, it’s with such little things as these that mankind can make tremendous strides.”

  George grunted. “That’s what I was afraid you’d say.”

  He reached out and overturned the nearest table, dumping blueprints and notebooks onto the floor.

  “What are you doing?” the man shouted, reaching toward George in an attempt to stop him. His hand was smacked away. George bent and, groaning with effort, broke off the leg of the table.

  The dog stood, watching the odd scene play out with an unnatural passivity. Its tail no longer wagged, but steam poured out of its ears as it held its position and simply kept watch with dead, mechanical eyes.

  It did not even move to defend itself when George began raining blows down onto its body with the table leg. It stood, stoic and still as each blow hit it, the noise of wood on metal a cracking sound that made the inventor cover his ears with his hands and shout at the automaton’s attacker.

  The shouts began as angry exclamations, demanding a different outcome, but as George continued the violent disassembling of the dog blow by blow, the shouts changed, became cries for mercy and finally—when the dog’s segmented spine gave way beneath the force of George’s determined swings—muffled sobs of a man who did not understand the violent destruction of his peaceful creation.

  The glass gut hit the floor and water gushed out, the fire in the mechanical heart sizzling and spitting before it extinguished, along with the inventor’s dream of a profitable holiday.

  “Damn it,” George muttered between panting breaths, seeing one last gasp of steam ooze out of the beast’s heart. “I needed that flame.” He looked around and grabbed the nearest lantern. Its candlelight flickered, the glass panes far from windproof. “You’d better get out while you still can,” he told the man coolly.

  The inventor didn’t take long to grasp what he intended to do next. He reached for a stack of papers, but George shook his head. “Trust me. You don’t want to take anything with you. Not even memories, if you catch my drift.” He swung the lantern in his hand as if winding up his arm for a devastating throw and the inventor rushed from the room—from his small home beside the tavern in the Burn Quarter—with only the clothes on his back.

  George grabbed the skeleton of the dog and dug a hand into it to better pull free the rest of its innards. He stepped on them, crushing them under his heel, and the whole time he thought about his boy back home and the threat his heritage hung over his head like the sword of Damocles.

  With a satisfied grunt, he reassessed the mechanical dog. It was dead. And with it the most recent threat of steam power shifting the status quo and pounding the comfortable paradigm into dust. Now nothing but a heap of mechanics inside a ruined house, merely a broken skeleton, its bones left to burn and then rust, lungs and heart stripped from it with only the hint of dark smoke smudging the spot where its precious internal organs should have been. It was a dark reminder of the fiery coal-powered heart that heated the watery gut and pushed steamy life into its limbs.

  He opened the lantern and pulled out the candlestick. With silent deliberation he touched the flame to each of the nearest stacks of papers.

  He stood there a moment while the place caught fire, watching the flames leap and lick while the smoke thickened. He shook his head then, wondering for a moment what amazing things this man might have wrought if life was only different.

  But life wasn’t. And there were dark things he had to do to keep them from becoming different. Things that maintained the status quo in Philadelphia, but also, and more importantly, the status quo in his own household—things that allowed him to keep his son.

  And to do that … well, a good father would do anything.

  And George was a good father.

  Of that much he was certain.

  Chapter Twelve

  And binding Nature fast in fate,

  Left free the human will.

  —ALEXANDER POPE

  Bangor

  Evie snared Rowen’s arm again and led him toward another section of the sprawling underground area known as the Hill King’s Cavern. “There is truly something for everyone here. Jewelry of all styles and origins, furniture and rugs of the same, a wide collection of clothing—erm—obtained from a wide variety of sources and through several different methods—always look for tears and bloodstains,” she warned with a glib smile. “There are flasks of mead, casks of ale, bottles of wine, and jugs of moonshine. Sugar cane and molasses, tobacco, rice and indigo, silk, wool and muslin, honey and maple syrup, ducks, chickens, hams, lobsters and shellfish, meats salted or smoked, and a variety of baked goods you simply can’t find aboard ship. Jade, lapis, amber, and pearls…”

  She snorted and motioned with a quick move of her head to a gaggle of women in low-cut blouses and tightly cinched bodices. “… and the women to buy them for. Or have them stolen from you by—watch the blonde, she has sticky fingers.” Then she smiled and wiggled her fingers at the group of them, smiling in particular at the blonde she’d just warned him of.

  “I really have no need of—”

  But she cut him off with a wave of her hand. “Rowen, you have plenty of needs, you just have very few coins with which to fill those needs. So we should be savvy with our shopping.”

  He nodded and set his jaw. A nice pair of pants and a good shirt would be a fine start. He had never needed to be a savvy shopper—he had always had more than enough money.

  They paused at a tent and the captain sorted through some things, held them up to Rowen to test the size, and in a language he recognized in no way she yammered something at the small woman behind the rickety table. The little woman shook her head no. That much he understood.

  Not far from where he stood, men mumbled. “Say the Stormbringer will be the greatest Weather Witch ever. More amazing than Galeyn Turell! That she’ll unify the cause and bring sweeping change.”

  “She?” another scoffed. “I heard he!”

  “All bull and bollocks—prophecies, feh! A lot of hooey and superstition if you ask me.”

  Evie held up one garment—a muslin shirt that seemed broad enough across the shoulders and chest for Rowen. She eyed the sleeves and the length of his arms and turned back to the shopkeeper. She pointed and again spewed out a long line of syllables he didn’t recognize.

  The woman again shook her head and Evie shook the shirt, pointing in exasperation to something on its chest. The shopkeeper stepped forward and Rowen bent around Evie to see whatever the captain was so vehemently discussing.

  Evie’s fingers stuck up through the bottom of the shirt and
wiggled out a hole in the chest. It wasn’t a wide tear, and easily mended if one had the time and the skill, but it was a tear nonetheless. Rowen frowned. Who would he find to mend such a thing? Just as he readied to tell the captain no himself, she invoked three words that made the little woman throw her arms into the air in exasperation.

  “Dead man’s deal.”

  With a huff and one last shake of her head she accepted the terms Evie had worked out.

  “Pay her,” Evie said, tossing the shirt at Rowen. It took more self-control than he’d expected not to step away from the shirt, but he caught it, fumbled for coins, and paid the woman.

  Evie was already outside the tent when Rowen caught up to her. “Is that how you do savvy shopping, buying clothing off a corpse?”

  “Don’t be so overly dramatic. The corpse that belonged to was nowhere in sight. And it’s not like the previous owner will come looking for it—stuck him like a pig, it seems,” she said with a toss of her head.

  Appalled, Rowen stood gawking after her a moment before he raced to catch up. “This is—”

  “Astonishing, appalling, disgusting, horrifying, an affront to modern sensibilities? Or all of those?” She raised one shoulder and dropped it in a shrug. “Apple?” she asked, raising a beautiful red fruit up to his nose. She didn’t wait for an answer but tossed a coin to the shopkeeper and threw a piece of fruit at him.

  “All of those,” he agreed.

  Again she shrugged. “It is as it is. This is how most of us live and someday it will be how many of us die.” She ran her fingers down the length of an exotic scarf that hung from the post of one stall. “It could be far worse. We are no man’s prisoners,” she remarked. “Unless you consider us prisoners of our own design.” She winked at him and continued up the aisle of stalls, fingers tracing over first one item and then another as she made it her duty to examine and enjoy every moment on land.

  “I have to make a stop, one task I must complete,” she explained, slipping down a side alley. “There.” She pointed to a small flag that sparkled. “This is the place. Come along.”

  He followed her into a tent and blinked at the crystals sparkling there.

  Beside a tiny table sat a wizened little lady with gray hair and matching eyes. She smiled, seeing Evie, and opened a chest by her feet. “You look positively right as rain, my dear,” she said, pulling out a leather pouch, its drawstring pulled tight. “As good as a power source can be,” she assured, handing the pouch over.

  “We are in your debt, Mother,” Evie said, but the old woman lifted a cane that rested on the floor beside her and jabbed Evie’s leg.

  “No, you shan’t be. Pay up,” she declared.

  Evie, chuckled, pulled out a tiny sack of coins. She tossed it to the woman and slipped back outside the tent, followed close behind by Rowen. She enclosed the pouch in a larger bag hanging at her side and smiled at Rowen. “Very nearly there. Now all we needs must do is meet an important man, do our exchange, and make our way with him to Philadelphia.”

  Rowen balked at the suggestion. “Back to Philadelphia? I—I need to get to Jordan.”

  “We will determine your lady’s next port of call and make sure you reach it, if that is truly what you want after this evening. But I think it is best to maintain an open mind in a place like this—and a close watch on your coins.”

  “No matter what happens here,” Rowen said, “I will be boarding a ship to get to the Artemesia and find Jordan—you cannot convince me to do otherwise.”

  Evie shrugged. “Let’s see what Fate has to say about that bold assertion of yours, young man,” she said, winking at him. “There is no ship slated to leave Bangor’s port until dawn.”

  Aboard the Artemesia

  It was as she slept that the ship first spoke to her. It filled her head with noise, with wind and rain and the cracking of thunder, the shiver of wood, metal, and canvas in flight. It flooded her with sensation instead of words, and Jordan, who thought part of herself dead, was on fire. She hungered and thirsted for the ship—the rough touch of its hidden timbers, the feel of its broad and beautiful sides where wind and weather had worn it smooth as a pebble in a stream bed. She wanted both the warmth of wood and the sharp cool touch of the metal.

  In the dream she stood Topside, one hand on the wheel, the sextant Anil had only recently showed her how to use in her other. She peered through a hole in the cloud cover cloaking the Artemesia and sighted their path with the aid of the stars. A cool breeze played across her skin and she suddenly realized she stood naked on the deck.

  Her chest tightened, her fingers turning to claws on the ship’s wheel. Her gaze left the star-filled heavens to search the deck, knowing somewhere nearby danger dwelled and she had not even clothing to keep—her eyes skimmed the shadows, terror growing inside her like an awful flower preparing to blossom—to keep the threat …

  The breeze warmed and soothed her and her mind grew fuzzy around the edges. Threat? Sharp as the cut of a tiny blade, memory of the threat came back and she pressed her legs together and watched the shadows shift—watched for him—the captain.

  The ship shuddered beneath her feet and her world wobbled and rippled like water. The scene changed, the dark of night whisked away and replaced with the impossibility of blue sky. Jordan’s mind rebelled—there were no airships that could fly without storm clouds swirling around them and tugging them about the heavens.

  The moment she doubted, she felt an ease seep into her—first from the air and then from the boards making up the deck of the ship. Her feet tingled and she looked at them, bare and kissed by the sun. They began to fuzz around their edges, to become indistinct. Her legs softened and her knees gave way and before she could scream she was absorbed into the airship like water.

  One with the fibers of the wood, she spread like western wildfire, sweeping through the ship, feeling its every pore and splinter. Her stomach dropped, rolled, and she spread her arms wide, fingertips losing form to feel and fill the wings, to catch the air underneath her and ride it like some Old World goddess.

  The crack and pop of lightning found her in the dream and struck. Thinking she’d be thrown onto the deck—remade, re-formed—instead she vaulted back awake.

  Upright in her bed, she felt her skin crawl with the sensation of a thousand fiery ants walking across it and she rubbed her arms. Outside her window lightning streaked across the sky and curved in its path.

  Seeking her.

  She pulled the covers tight around her and watched as it flared toward her window before it—in a near-conscious state of self-control—spattered in a spray of brilliant sparks. She waited to smell the singe of wood or see the burst of flame, but nothing came.

  She drew the covers tighter—to her chin—and curled onto her bed, watching the lightning dance. Closing her eyes she realized how desperately she missed the sun.

  Bangor

  “Anything you can find in any major city can be found here, and more,” Evie proclaimed boldly. “And things that cannot be found in any major city—well, certainly not legally,” she added with a wink. “We have the advantage when it comes to trade—whoever controls transportation controls trade. Whoever controls trade controls the economy. And whoever controls the economy … well, they control the world.”

  Rowen snorted. “I beg to differ.” He rounded on her, saying, “What of the military? They control the weapons and the fighting men,” he pointed out with pride. “From what I see, the military is the most powerful force. Whoever controls the military controls the world.”

  She smirked. “Your people are slow to lose their rank affiliations, are they not? Perhaps I would have been just as blind had I been born into a more worthwhile rank,” she added before continuing with, “however, I do feel it is my duty, as your cap— hostess, to educate you as to the real ways of the world.”

  He raised an eyebrow and crossed his arms over his chest. “Well, by all means—do educate me. Please.”

  “I shall endeavor to do
my best,” she assured him. “Though, as they say, you can lead a horse to water…”

  He snorted. “… and see it devoured by Merrow.”

  “Not the traditional phrase, but true enough.” She snagged a long lock of her hair and swished it between her fingers. “You say the one who controls the military controls the world, and yet consider these facts: the military only gets as far as they can be transported.”

  “Men have legs—the military marches right well and covers great distances when needs be.”

  “True, true,” she conceded. “And they are loyal. But even the most loyal of men have needs that must be met.”

  “Of course.”

  “By more than camp followers.”

  He bridled at the insinuation. “We are fed, clothed, nursed when wounded, and paid.”

  “And what if that changed? What if the pay went away? Would the military still fight?”

  His other eyebrow rose to match the first. “Some might…” But his hesitancy marked his argument as failing.

  “The economy, which is controlled by transportation of goods and services, is the thing supplying a military man’s pay. And an unpaid military man will continue in his duty as much as an unpaid seamstress continues in hers,” Evie said.

  “No. Longer.” Rowen’s voice was firm, the hesitancy gone. “There is where your logic slips a cog. A military man, paid or unpaid, will always outlast the commitment of a seamstress because of one simple thing you have overlooked—believing in a mission. I daresay a soldier will believe in the job he has been set more than a seamstress believes in the stitches she sews.”

  She winked at him. “A fine point. But if you wish me to believe that the economy does not impact the ability of the military to function…”

  “No, you are correct. But it may not be as immediate an impact as you believe. How might I expect differently? You are not affiliated with the military and do not understand our ways.”

  “You, my dear, are also not currently affiliated with the military,” she reminded him.