Swords & Steam Short Stories

by S. T. Joshi

  He studied her face in the weak dawn light. Not a trap, he decided. Or if it was, she was an extraordinary actress.

  “How?” he asked.

  It was her turn to look at him distrustfully.

  “Listen,” said Getan. “I need to know if you’re serious. Which means I need to know how your scheme works.”

  Hana was silent for a long time. At last, she sighed. “We dress you in khaki. Send you back on a hospital train.”

  “I thought it was something like that.” He shook his head. “Won’t work. The Ravens check every transport leaving the front. They –”

  “We know about the Ravens. We can suppress your magic so they won’t sense you.”

  “That’s not possible. Not unless –”

  “We use chokeberry,” Hana said. “It’s a natural antagonist to magic. Just as redfoil and mallow enhance magic, chokeberry suppresses it.”

  “Chokeberry is toxic. And the quantity you’d need to use –”

  “I didn’t say it was pleasant. But there’s an antidote for that too.”

  “Fine,” Getan said. “Let’s say you can do it. Why me?”

  She gave him a look of exasperation.

  He flushed. “I mean, why not one of those poor bastards over there?” He waved a hand at the infantry lines across the road.

  “Because you’re a mage. You can change things. With enough mages, we could end this war.”

  A price, he thought. There is always a price.

  “So if you get me home, I have to work for you,” he said. “Is that it?”

  Just say ‘yes’, the voice in his head told him. Anything is better than staying here and dying.

  Hana looked at him coldly. “You do what you think best,” she said. “We get you away from the front. What you do after that is up to you.”

  He sat in silence, thinking. It was a gamble. He would be trusting his life to a woman who was almost a stranger, trusting not only that she was not trying to trap him, but also that she and whoever she was working with knew what they were doing. It was madness.

  It was his only chance.

  “Yes,” he heard himself say. Then, “When?”

  “The next train leaves in two days time, eleven in the morning. Meet me here at six. Just you. No one else.”

  She turned then and left, walking away quickly as if anxious to leave before he changed his mind.

  * * *

  The next morning, the Ravens came.

  There were three of them, a captain with the silver sigil of a mage-inquisitor on the sleeve of his tunic, and two sergeants. In their broad-brimmed hats and heavy black capes, the resemblance to their namesakes was eerie.

  When Getan saw them, his first thought was that Hana had betrayed him after all, that he had condemned himself and perhaps others as well to torture and exile. He felt a sudden vertigo, as if the ground had dropped out from underneath him.

  “Beg pardon, mages.” The landlord of the inn appeared from behind the Ravens, like a fat little rabbit pulled from a hat. He rubbed his pudgy hands together nervously. “I have to ask you to move out of your room.”

  Getan blinked at him, bewildered.

  “I can make you comfortable,” the landlord babbled. “In the stables. I’ll send the girl over with clean blankets.”

  Very slowly it began to dawn on Getan that he was not being arrested. He nodded, trying not to let the relief show in his face.

  “That’s fine,” he said.

  The two Raven sergeants waited outside the door while Getan and Otring packed up their kit. One of the inn maids fumbled her way around the room, flapping ineffectually at the furniture with a duster, trying vainly to displace the accumulated grime of months of neglect. Evidently, the panic had become general.

  “Gods, but I hate those bastards,” muttered Otring to Getan as they laid out their bedrolls in the stables later. Getan glanced over at the adjacent cots where Myrell and the other junior mage were sleeping.

  “Guilty conscience?” he said.

  Otring flushed. “You know me,” he said. “But even so …” He shook his head.

  “Mmm.”

  “I just don’t like having them around. Make me feel like I’ve done something wrong even when I haven’t.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Getan.

  Later, as he walked across the yard, he saw Hana emerge from the inn with two other nurses, on their way to the field hospital. She did not meet his eye.

  * * *

  Getan was woken by a long whistle that ended with a muffled thud, like a door slamming. He lay awake, trying to make sense of the sounds.

  The mages had lain down to sleep early, in anticipation of another night sortie. The luminous hands of the watch hanging by his cot showed it to be just after nine. He had been asleep no more than two hours.

  There was another whistle and another thump, much louder this time. The dangling watch trembled.

  Getan was suddenly wide awake. He leapt up from his cot.

  “Get up!” he shouted, shaking Otring. “Artillery!”

  Otring sat up, rubbing his eyes. “Can’t use artillery –” he said.

  “The mage screen is down! They –” His words were cut off by a fresh shriek from overhead and a tremendous crash.

  Outside, everything was chaos. There were screams from the meadow where the infantry regiment was encamped, half-drowned by the howl of escaping steam. Normally, both sides protected their front lines against artillery with screen mages trained to intercept incoming shells and fling them back at their source. The mages lived in secure bunkers well back from the forward lines; if the Shulan screen was down, then either the Keldites had infiltrated a suicide squad or the entire front was collapsing.

  Again, he heard the rising howl of an incoming shell. This time, the thunderclap of the explosion was deafeningly close, accompanied by a brilliant blue-orange flash. A hot wind filled with fragments of stone and metal battered at the shield that Getan flung up. Part of the inn vomited flame and collapsed.

  By the light of the burning building at his back he could see that two of the parked hulls were unsalvageable, riddled with splinters, bleeding fuel and water. The third had steam up, its crew of stokers and soldiers already aboard.

  “We should wait for the others –” Otring panted as they ran for the hull.

  “You saw where the shell hit,” Getan said. He jumped onto the vehicle and heaved open the hatch on the back of the steel egg. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw that Myrell and another mage he did not recognize had followed them out of the inferno. Four was enough to make a gestalt. It would have to be.

  Another shell screamed overhead and detonated somewhere behind them. The enemy gunners were changing their point of aim with each round, walking the shots toward the rear lines, toward the hospital and the railhead beyond.

  The vehicle commander’s head and shoulders appeared in the hatch as Getan strapped himself in. “Orders, war mage?”

  Getan felt in the pocket beside his seat for his injector, hoping that someone had remembered to refill it. “The enemy guns can’t be far from their front line,” he said. “We’re going to have to punch through. Take out the guns or the mages directing the fire.”

  The commander nodded. He ducked back, slamming the hatch shut. With a long hoarse whistle from the steam siren, the vehicle lurched into motion.

  * * *

  Getan stumbled blindly through the pale light of dawn, beyond fatigue, beyond awareness of anything except the need to keep putting one foot after another. Fighting was still going on somewhere to the east, the snap of rifle rounds mingled with the hiss of mage-fire. No more shells whistled overhead.

  “Can stop now …” said Otring, his voice thick with exhaustion. “… safe here.” He slumped down on a firestep, his back against the muddy tren
ch wall. A group of soldiers in Shulan uniforms stared at them curiously.

  Getan kept walking, his eyes fixed on the humped shape of the ruined inn silhouetted against the dawn sky. He leaned to one side as he walked, unbalanced by the weight of Myrell’s body over his shoulder.

  Something moved in the gloom and for a moment Getan thought he was hallucinating again. Then the black bird-shape resolved into the figure of a man in a black uniform, a silver sigil on his sleeve glinting in the dawn light.

  “Where are you going, mage?” the Raven asked.

  “Hospital,” Getan said.

  “And the guns?”

  “Destroyed.”

  The Raven stepped back. “Good work,” he said. “You’ll probably get a commendation for that.”

  Getan walked on without answering. It was hard to speak or think now. He felt a trickle of blood run down his chin.

  By the inn fence, he eased Myrell gently off his shoulder and set him down on his feet. “You have to walk now,” he told the young mage. “I can’t carry you any more.”

  “Can’t we just stop here?” Myrell’s face was chalk-white, the front of his uniform soaked in blood. His voice was scarcely more than a whisper.

  “Not yet,” Getan said. “Soon.” He slipped his shoulder under Myrell’s arm, forcing him to stand upright.

  Hana was waiting for them by the walled garden, accompanied by two orderlies. Her eyes widened at the sight of them.

  “I can’t take both of you,” she said. “I only have papers for one.”

  “I know,” said Getan.

  The orderlies took Myrell from him and laid the young mage gently down on a stretcher.

  “What will you do now?” Hana asked.

  “I’ll think of something,” Getan said.

  He kissed her then. Afterwards, he held her for a long moment, breathing in the smell of her hair, feeling her warm breath on his neck. Then he turned away from her and went back to the war.

  Three Lines Of Old French

  A. Merritt

  “BUT rich as was the war for surgical science,” ended Hawtry, “opening up through mutilation and torture unexplored regions which the genius of man was quick to enter, and, entering, found ways to checkmate suffering and death – for always, my friend, the distillate from the blood of sacrifice is progress – great as all this was, the world tragedy has opened up still another region wherein even greater knowledge will be found. It was the clinic unsurpassed for the psychologist even more than for the surgeon.”

  Latour, the great little French doctor, drew himself out of the depths of the big chair; the light from the fireplace fell ruddily upon his keen face.

  “That is true,” he said. “Yes, that is true. There in the furnace the mind of man opened like a flower beneath a too glowing sun. Beaten about in that colossal tempest of primitive forces, caught in the chaos of energies both physical and psychical – which, although man himself was its creator, made of their maker a moth in a whirlwind – all those obscure, those mysterious factors of mind which men, for lack of knowledge, have named the soul, were stripped of their inhibitions and given power to appear.

  “How could it have been otherwise – when men and women, gripped by one shattering sorrow or joy, will manifest the hidden depths of spirit – how could it have been otherwise in that steadily maintained crescendo of emotion?” McAndrews spoke.

  “Just which psychological region do you mean, Hawtry?” he asked.

  There were four of us in front of the fireplace of the Science Club – Hawtry, who rules the chair of psychology in one of our greatest colleges, and whose name is an honored one throughout the world; Latour, an immortal of France; McAndrews, the famous American surgeon whose work during the war has written a new page in the shining book of science; and myself. These are not the names of the three, but they are as I have described them; and I am pledged to identify them no further.

  “I mean the field of suggestion,” replied the psychologist.

  “The mental reactions which reveal themselves as visions – an accidental formation in the clouds that becomes to the overwrought imaginations of the beholders the so-eagerly-prayed-for hosts of Joan of Arc marching out from heaven; moonlight in the cloud rift that becomes to the besieged a fiery cross held by the hands of archangels; the despair and hope that are transformed into such a legend as the bowmen of Mons, ghostly archers who with their phantom shafts overwhelm the conquering enemy; wisps of cloud over No Man’s Land that are translated by the tired eyes of those who peer out into the shape of the Son of Man himself walking sorrowfully among the dead. Signs, portents, and miracles, the hosts of premonitions, of apparitions of loved ones – all dwellers in this land of suggestion; all born of the tearing loose of the veils of the subconscious. Here, when even a thousandth part is gathered, will be work for the psychological analyst for twenty years.”

  “And the boundaries of this region?” asked McAndrews.

  “Boundaries?” Hawtry plainly was perplexed.

  McAndrews for a moment was silent. Then he drew from his pocket a yellow slip of paper, a cablegram.

  “Young Peter Laveller died today,” he said, apparently irrelevantly. “Died where he had set forth to pass – in the remnants of the trenches that cut through the ancient domain of the Seigneurs of Tocquelain, up near Bethune.”

  “Died there!” Hawtry’s astonishment was profound. “But I read that he had been brought home; that, indeed, he was one of your triumphs, McAndrews!”

  “I said he went there to die,” repeated the surgeon slowly.

  So that explained the curious reticence of the Lavellers as to what had become of their soldier son – a secrecy which had puzzled the press for weeks. For young Peter Laveller was one of the nation’s heroes. The only boy of old Peter Laveller – and neither is that the real name of the family, for, like the others, I may not reveal it – he was the heir to the grim old coal king’s millions, and the secret, best loved pulse of his heart.

  Early in the war he had enlisted with the French. His father’s influence might have abrogated the law of the French army that every man must start from the bottom up – I do not know – but young Peter would have none of it. Steady of purpose, burning with the white fire of the first Crusaders, he took his place in the ranks.

  Clean-cut, blue-eyed, standing six feet in his stocking feet, just twenty-five, a bit of a dreamer, perhaps, he was one to strike the imagination of the poilus, and they loved him. Twice was he wounded in the perilous days, and when America came into the war he was transferred to our expeditionary forces. It was at the siege of Mount Kemmel that he received the wounds that brought him back to his father and sister. McAndrews had accompanied him overseas, I knew, and had patched him together – or so all thought.

  What had happened then – and why had Laveller gone back to France, to die, as McAndrews put it?

  He thrust the cablegram back into his pocket.

  “There is a boundary, John,” he said to Hawtry. “Laveller’s was a borderland case. I’m going to tell it to you.” He hesitated. “I ought not to, maybe; and yet I have an idea that Peter would like it told; after all, he believed himself a discoverer.” Again he paused; then definitely made up his mind, and turned to me.

  “Merritt, you may make use of this if you think it interesting enough. But if you do so decide, then change the names, and be sure to check description short of any possibility of ready identification. After all, it is what happened that is important – and those to whom it happened do not matter.”

  I promised, and I have observed my pledge. I tell the story as he whom I call McAndrews reconstructed it for us there in the shadowed room, while we sat silent until he had ended.

  Laveller stood behind the parapet of a first-line trench. It was night – an early April night in northern France – and when that is said, all is said to those who have be
en there.

  Beside him was a trench periscope. His gun lay touching it. The periscope is practically useless at night; so through a slit in the sandbags he peered out over the three-hundred-foot-wide stretch of No Man’s Land.

  Opposite him he knew that other eyes lay close to similar slits in the German parapet, watchful as his were for the least movement.

  There were grotesque heaps scattered about No Man’s Land, and when the star-shells burst and flooded it with their glare these heaps seemed to stir to move – some to raise themselves, some to gesticulate, to protest. And this was very horrible, for those who moved under the lights were the dead – French and English, Prussian and Bavarian – dregs of a score of carryings to the red wine-press of war set up in this sector.

  There were two Jocks on the entanglements; kilted Scots, one colandered by machine-gun hail just as he was breaking through. The shock of the swift, manifold death had hurled his left arm about the neck of the comrade close beside him; and this man had been stricken within the same second. There they leaned, embracing – and as the star-shells flared and died, flared and died, they seemed to rock, to try to break from the wire, to dash forward, to return.

  Laveller was weary, weary beyond all understanding. The sector was a bad one and nervous. For almost seventy-two hours he had been without sleep – for the few minutes now and then of dead stupor broken by constant alarms was worse than sleep.

  The shelling had been well-nigh continuous, and the food scarce and perilous to get; three miles back through the fire they had been forced to go for it; no nearer than that could the ration dumps be brought.

  And constantly the parapets had to be rebuilt and the wires repaired – and when this was done the shells destroyed again, and once more the dreary routine had to be gone through; for the orders were to hold this sector at all costs.

  All that was left of Laveller’s consciousness was concentrated in his eyes; only his seeing faculty lived. And sight, obeying the rigid, inexorable will commanding every reserve of vitality to concentrate on the duty at hand, was blind to everything except the strip before it that Laveller must watch until relieved. His body was numb; he could not feel the ground with his feet, and sometimes he seemed to be floating in air like – like the two Scots upon the wire!