Swords & Steam Short Stories

by S. T. Joshi

  He whipped his neck back and forth and the whistle of the cat’s ropes sang through the salty air. Blood welled up from the new ragged gouges in his back. Bourne had been so sick upon the deck that his body trembled with the weakness of not eating.

  “I’m so sorry, Jackson,” Bourne whispered for the hundredth time. “I can never truly ask for your forgiveness now …”

  The Windcatcher grinned and continued ‘Spanish Ladies’. Bourne sang alongside the doomed man until they reached the very end of the song, voices harsh with, “We’ll drink and be jolly and drown melancholy, and here’s to the health of each true-hearted soul!”

  * * *

  Bourne had not slept for thirty-six hours, and the sobs and cries of his fellow man rent his soul in twain. The moon shone watery above them, and finally Jackson’s whisper-singing of “drown melancholy” made something within the young midshipman snap.

  Jackson could no longer stand, but Bourne helped the dying man to his feet with a rush of air to assist. The heat of the man’s skin blazed iron-hot, as if it were cannon shot heated in a furnace. With a weak smile, Jackson began to croak out the beginning of ‘Spanish Ladies’.

  It would mean his death, Bourne knew. Even if he did live to see a court martial. Moving with his comrade in arms, Bourne nodded to the Windcatcher as they approached the gunwale.

  They both stared into the dark ocean.

  Up on the quarterdeck, the Captain paced, hands calmly behind his back. But he stopped to watch them, those dark eyes no more than cruel pits.

  With a gentle shove of wind, Bourne lifted the dying man from the ship and out into the sea. Jackson didn’t even flail, but was consumed by the waters as if folded back into their embrace with that same vacant grin.

  An eerie calm descended over him, the crushing guilt dissipating as he touched the fickle winds with a secret Windcatcher’s joy.

  Captain Ramsay smiled at him smugly, the corners of his mouth stretching into its malicious formation.

  The man had known. He’d known. And still he’d watched as Bourne remained silent and Jackson had paid the ultimate price. As a test. To flush out his quarry, to make Bourne reveal his secret sin.

  A dark and frozen wrath consumed him, and the wispy clouds above grew heavy and grey, the breeze hammering inside of his veins, ready to pour forth. It pulsed inside of him, calling with eager joy at such destruction.

  Ramsay pointed his bony finger, just like in Bourne’s nightmare. “There. Now we see the true Devil revealed.”

  Bourne lips twisted in revulsion. “Aye, sir, we do.”

  Without gesture or movement, Bourne directed the full force of wind to gather the Captain from his throne upon the quarterdeck, and lifted the man into the air – hovering like a spectre. Ramsay’s eyes bulged as the air was sucked from his lungs; the man clasped at his throat, his fingernails scratching furrows into his neck in desperation. Bourne lifted him higher, almost to the top of the mainmast, and the roar of ecstasy burrowed deep under his skin; the Captain’s face grew taught and pale, the muscles of his neck standing out like ropes.

  The gale force moved the condemned man out over the sea, hovering over the place where Jackson had gone under. And with a gleeful cry, Bourne held the man underwater, just as Ramsay had done in Bourne’s nightmare. The waves battered over the craggy visage struggling against the water entering his mouth. He was laughing now, breathless, as the Captain’s body went rigid, then sank beneath the waters to attend to his eternal grave.

  Bourne’s triumph lasted for but a moment, before the wind beneath his skin, traveling through his veins, turned to pain. It lashed at him, until his chest felt struck a blow from a hard fist. The soaring sensation became fire, burning him from the inside. It flayed him, the percussive force rending his flesh – he could see lash marks rising over his hands, realizing blearily that his veins were rupturing.

  The wind lifted him of its own accord. Higher. The wind blasted his cheeks raw; he blinked blood, but saw that the sea awaited him below. And in desperation he tried to wrestle with the invisible force, but was only met with more agony.

  He felt the lurch as the wind released him. And he fell.

  The sea smashed his body into pulp, and he sank downward. Down toward the seabed where Ramsay and Jackson awaited.

  And all he thought before his air abandoned him completely was: Farewell and adieu.

  War Mage

  Angus McIntyre

  The fighting hull was three times the height of a man, a flattened steel egg perched on the front of an armored chassis that bristled with firing slits and stubby smoke-vents. In its glossy black paint, it reminded Getan of the big black ants that were everywhere on his uncle’s farm in the Brintels.

  The paint had lost some of its gloss now, scarred and stained by a month at the front. Infantrymen with buckets of water had washed off much of the mud, but they could do little about the bright dings left by rifle rounds or the scorch marks that covered most of the right side. A near-miss from an enemy projector had bubbled and blistered the paint, giving it a scabrous look.

  “Tough old girl,” observed Otring. Getan grunted. He felt no inclination to romanticize the hull. It was an ugly implement of destruction, the latest murderous fad in a pointless war. More particularly, it was his personal place of imprisonment. He had spent the last six weeks squeezed inside that steel egg with seven other war mages, sweating in his leather harness, dope-dazed and deafened by the thunder of the pistons at his back. He hated it intimately, hated the fear and discomfort, hated being part of the war machine. Unlike Otring, he had not learned to submerge his resentment in facile patriotism.

  He took two cigarettes from the pocket of his uniform blouse and murmured a fire spell to light them both. He stuck one in his mouth and passed the other to Otring.

  They sat smoking in silence, enjoying the calm of the meadow. The trees here were in full leaf, spreading their shade over soil that had not been churned to mud or burned to sand by thaumaturgic fire. The breeze did not smell of smoke or rotting bodies, and there were no piled sandbags or trenches choked with human remains. Eight miles from the front-line, it was possible to imagine that the whole world was at peace. The only sour note was the looming monstrosity of the hull, a malignant presence squatting in the middle of the green field.

  They were on their third cigarette when the asthmatic wheeze of a steam car broke the quiet. Getan turned his head to watch the vehicle lumber down the cart track towards them.

  “Here comes the war again,” he said. Otring sighed.

  There were three men in the car, two soldiers in khaki and a thin figure in mage’s gray. As the vehicle slowed to a halt, the mage jumped down and stood for a moment looking up at the hull as if unsure what to do next.

  “Over here,” Otring called. The gray-clad figure turned, caught sight of the two men under the tree, and hurried over.

  “War Mage Fourth Class Myrell, reporting for duty, sir.” The newcomer was fresh-faced and almost eerily clean. Getan thought he looked too young to be in uniform.

  “You don’t have to salute us,” said Otring. “War Mage Fourth Otring. And the Norlander lout next to me is called Absyne. What are you, Absyne? Sixth Class? Seventh?”

  “Third Class, brevetted,” said Getan. “Which makes me your superior. A little respect, please.”

  The boy looked back and forth between them.

  “Please, sir,” he said. “Where are the others?”

  Otring waved a hand toward the line of tents farther down the field. “Four are sleeping out the hot part of the day over there. And poor Roshan is sleeping rather more permanently under about four feet of earth on the far side of that hedge. Brain aneurysm during the last push.”

  The boy glanced toward the hedge, then looked back at Otring.

  “That’s right,” said Otring. “You’re his replacement.”

&n
bsp; * * *

  The hull lurched and came down with a tooth-rattling thump, tracks clattering and shrieking. Getan groaned as he was flung against his harness, his head smacking against the inadequate padding of the headrest. His nostrils were full of the stink of sweat and leather.

  “One hundred yards. Prepare to engage.” The voice of the fire director was barely audible over the clamor of the pistons behind him.

  He let himself submerge into the gestalt again, becoming one with the other seven mages. Their auras blended with his, their collective energy building up like a thunderstorm around him. Sparks of mage-fire crawled over the inside of the steel shell, shedding a bluish light that turned the faces of the men inside into hollow-eyed skulls.

  The hull jolted again and Getan’s boot thumped into the shoulder of the man seated in front of him. The mages were seated in two banked rows, jammed shoulder to shoulder with hardly room to breathe, let alone move. There was some science to the exact proportions of the hull, the engineers insisting that it had to be kept as small as possible in order to focus the combined energies to optimal effect. All Getan knew was that riding the hull was as close to Hell as anything he expected to experience in this lifetime.

  The energy was building still, but the shape of the field was wrong. Getan could feel Myrell shrinking away from the gestalt, beginning to drain his power out of the field. He remembered his own first battle, how close he had come to panicking and collapsing the thaumaturgic bubble completely. Only an effort of will had kept him from cowering down in his seat and wrapping all the power he had protectively around himself.

  He pushed more of his own energy into the field, feeling out the threads of Myrell’s energy and buttressing them, guiding the lines of force outwards to meld into the whole again. Myrell relaxed fractionally, his panic receding. The bubble swelled again, full and perfect.

  “Target in range.” The guide vanes re-aligned with a metallic scrape. The bubble of magical energy pulsed, sustained now by the combined will of all eight mages.

  “Discharge.” Getan’s skin crawled as the accumulated energy was released. The steel egg of the hull vomited a bolus of thaumaturgic power toward the target. There was a distant boom of thunder, followed by the patter of rock and rubble cascading back to earth. Getan had no idea what they had just fired at: an enemy hull, a line of infantry, a fortification. There was no way to see out of the egg, but sometimes you could feel men dying, tiny sparks of life that flickered and faded. Getan was relieved that this time there was none of that.

  “Prepare to recharge.” The vehicle snorted steam, the tracks ground into reverse, and the hull lurched backwards. Getan braced himself and started feeding energy into the field again.

  * * *

  “Is it always like that?” Myrell asked. His upper lip was crusted with dried blood and his face was deathly pale.

  “That was an easy one,” said Otring hoarsely.

  Getan leaned back against a pile of sandbags. They were still close enough to the front that he could hear the distant crack of rifle fire and the occasional hollow boom of thaumaturgic artillery. There were death spells being used somewhere too, probably Keldite mages probing the Shulan forward trenches. He could feel them at a distance, pinpoints of dark magic picking at the fabric of reality.

  He felt sick and shaky, with a slow ache in his bones that was more than just the result of spending too much energy in too short a time. The alchemists had changed the formula of the dope again. The new stuff was more potent, rich with magical ingredients and stimulants, but the come-down was a killer. He peered at the injection site in his arm. It looked swollen and angry and he wondered if it was infected. He would have to watch that; hygiene was next to impossible at the front.

  “Go get some sleep,” Otring told the boy. “We may be back in action in a few hours.”

  They watched the younger mage stumble off toward the rear of the inn, where the stables had been turned into an improvised bunkroom.

  “Not going to make it,” Otring said when Myrell was out of sight.

  “He’ll be fine,” said Getan, not really believing it. “The first time is tough for everyone.”

  “He’s weak,” Otring insisted. “You felt it.”

  Getan closed his eyes. Not weak, he thought, but strong. Strong enough not to give in. Strong enough to try to be himself.

  Otring was right, though. Myrell was not going to make it.

  * * *

  The inn that served as their usual forward staging post was almost a mile behind the front line. It must once have been an elegant establishment, with graceful roofs in the Shulan style shading broad porches at front and back. Now the wide windows were boarded up and the eaves were hung with ugly protective charms. An infantry regiment was camped in the adjacent field. The stench of the field latrines overpowered the smell of the roses in the inn’s walled garden.

  The crews of three hulls occupied the top floor and the stables. The ground floor was filled with nurses from the nearby field hospital. The women worked even longer hours than the mages. Getan saw them only in passing, staggering home exhausted in twos and threes to snatch a few hours of sleep before they were called back to work.

  So it was a surprise when he opened the wooden door to the garden and saw one of the nurses sitting by the dried-up fishpond. He started to close the door again, but the woman saw him, and signaled him to come in.

  “I’m not disturbing you, am I?” he said.

  She shook her head. “The garden’s big enough for two, I think,” she said, with a slight smile.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Ma’am?” she said. “The war must have aged me more than I thought.”

  Getan flushed. It was not like him to be awkward around girls. He remembered his manners, and bowed, bringing his heels smartly together.

  “War mage Absyne, at your service …nurse.”

  “War mage. So you crew one of those horrid things outside?”

  “Yes, m–”

  She smiled again. “My name is Hana. You can use it if you’ll promise to stop ma’am’ing me. Do you have a first name?”

  “Getan.”

  “That’s a Norland name, yes?”

  “My father was a Norlander.”

  She nodded. “Honored to meet you, Getan.” She waved one slender hand. “Please, sit down. You make me nervous, towering over me.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  * * *

  After that first meeting, Getan started to make a point of looking in on the garden whenever he was off duty. Most of the time he went away disappointed, but on a few occasions he was rewarded by the sight of Hana sitting on one of the benches, her nose usually deep in a book. He had a sense that she too was finding pretexts to be there. On their third meeting, he got up the courage to ask her whether she would go for a walk with him.

  He took her to a place he had found where an avenue of trees flanked an overgrown cart track: not the most romantic destination, but one of the least touched by war. Only a stretch of stone wall pockmarked by rifle fire and the twisted ribs of a dirigible that had foundered in an adjoining field hinted at the conflict.

  “Did you always want to be a soldier?” she asked as he helped her over a stile.

  He shook his head. “Never.”

  “But you volunteered –”

  “No.” He waited, thinking she did not understand. “The Conscription Act requires anyone who possesses certain …abilities …to serve.”

  “And you can’t just leave? Disappear?”

  “They call that desertion. The penalties are severe.” Not death, he thought. A mage was too valuable. But death might be kinder. “There are special units of mages,” he explained. “They call them Ravens. Their job is to prevent any desertions.”

  She leaned against the fence. “But if you could get
away, would you?”

  A sudden suspicion seized him. Was she an agent provocateur, sent to test his loyalty?

  “I’m a patriot,” he said. “My place is here. Until our victory.”

  Her face was unreadable. “Of course,” she said.

  * * *

  Officially, the war was going well. Privately, Getan suspected that it was stalemate. Hunkered down in their trenches, the infantry sniped unenthusiastically at each other. At dusk, the hulls lumbered out to throw a few futile fireballs at the enemy fortifications, then clanked home again at dawn, the mages in their steel shells shaking and spent, drained by the energies that had flowed through them. One of Getan’s crew was invalided home, flash-burned by a fireball from an enemy battery that almost overwhelmed their collective defenses. A mage even younger than Myrell took his place.

  Getan slept, ate, fought, then slept again. When he could, he spent time with Hana, but her own routine was as punishing as his. The flow of sick and wounded from the front had not slowed.

  One morning, when the hull returned at dawn from a sortie, she was waiting for him by the inn door. Bleary-eyed, he would have walked right past her if Otring had not nudged him.

  “There’s your girl,” Otring said. “Better not keep her waiting. You know how women are when they want it.”

  Behind him, Myrell grinned. His face was blotched with dried blood – another nosebleed – and the effect was ghastly.

  Getan waited until the other mages had stumbled off to their beds and then let Hana lead him to the garden. He was happy to let the others think it was a simple assignation, but he guessed that she had something more serious in mind.

  “I asked you once if you wanted to get away,” she said, as soon as they were alone. “I’ll ask you one more time.”