Steampunk Hearts

by Jordan Reece

  She would be all right. Wherever it was she ended up, she would be fine. Though the dragon’s eye was an aggravation, in this instance, he was thankful for the knowledge it gave.

  He cast an angry look to Westen. “Does this amuse you too, hearing how I feel?”

  “Not as much as you think. Nor am I as callous as you accuse me.”

  Elario scoffed.

  “They would have killed you, Elario! Or taken you somewhere to have others kill you! So no, I feel no grief that they have been killed instead.” Westen’s handsome face hardened; his tone was full of reproval. “You waste empathy on men who would grant none to you. As to a long life cheapening the shorter ones around me, I cannot debate that with conviction, and I won’t. You do not grieve too hard a field of flowers that lifts its green, blossoms in all its beauty, and withers, to be reborn next spring. That is what mortals do, flowering and fruiting and dying, replaced by new names and new faces.”

  “We are not . . . a crop!” Elario said, shaking drops of water from the pestle. “How can you say such a thing out one side of your mouth, and out the other side claim not to be callous?”

  “Because it is distant to me, as one untethered to the clock. I have watched many generations rise and fall. How can I cry for all of them? Would you have me weep at each grave and tear at my hair? That is callous of you. I do not care as much as you because to care, to care as a man who cannot die is unbearable. I had to stop caring after the first two hundred years, or surrender my sanity to infinite cuts.”

  Hobbe ferried the other horses to the grass on the hillside. There was no grain, so they had to eat what grew from the soil. Their tails swished as Elario set down his mortar and pestle to dry. He could not let go of this argument; Westen’s laughter disturbed him too much. “They valued their own lives, even if you did not value them, even if they meant us ill. They had friends and family who valued them. Even if you cannot feel grief or the barest shred of pity, you can do the bare minimum of stifling your amusement. I fear what you will be in another five hundred years! You might as well roam the streets with the dervesh for all that will be left of the human within you.”

  Bemused, Westen said, “To live so on the edge of things, Master Elario Repse. When you cannot die, the passion for life is what one leaves behind.”

  “Then I cannot fathom why you are striving to keep me alive, just one more flower in the field,” Elario said acidly. “Unless my life is another queer entertainment to you, in which case I would be served better by going off on my own.”

  A hint of anxiety furrowed Westen’s brow. “Your life is not entertainment to me. That far down the slope I have not fallen yet.”

  “Even now, you joke,” Elario scolded. “It is not me that you protect anyway but the dragon’s eye.”

  “Mercy!” Westen held up his hands in peace. “You care too much; I care too little; let’s meet one another halfway. Expend your grief upon those who have done no wrong and I shall withhold my laughter for those who have. I should not have mocked them in their terror. I have helped others in similar straits, so credit me in that.”

  Elario tidied his herbal case. “My uncle. Why did you help him?”

  “I suppose I pity them, even if I have lost the ability to recognize the emotion. These madcaps who stumble about the Great Cities grasping after treasure . . . Perhaps I envy them their dreams. Once I would have risked my life for gold, too, and adventure. I do not often reach the hunters in time, but your uncle I did. He had the fortune, and the misfortune, to be ensnared by an emoralis. A death by emoralis is the work of months. I happened upon him in summer; it had been feeding upon him since spring. He was thin as a crawler rail and lost within its mist upon a street.”

  “Emoralis is the god of grief,” Elario said. “But not a god in truth.”

  “Emoralis is a dervesh knack creation that draws upon memories. Within it, as one is consumed, you experience the lives of others as if they are yours. Hydon lived and died the fall of the Great Cities thousands of times within the emoralis. And though this may sound cruel to you, it is not the cruelest of fates. A dervesh like the circlet can keep its victim alive for centuries, drugging the mind into a silly stupor while pricking the body with pain that leaves no mark.”

  You speak as if I stood apart. I lived it and died in it twenty thousand times over.

  “I heard his voice when I was aboard the aerial,” Elario said. “Recounting the deaths of a baby torn from his mother and thrown to his death; a husband trying to save his wife; a boy who hid while his family were slain by dervesh, and they killed him later on. Hydon was speaking of his time within the emoralis. How did you extract him from it?”

  “An emoralis cannot feed from me.” Westen brushed the droplets off the mortar with a fold of his shirt. Elario let him. “I walked in, hefted what was left of Hydon over my shoulder, and walked out. We fled the Wickewoods together and I nursed him back to health in Drouthe. He was not the same young man who left the emoralis as he was the man who went in. No one would be, I presume-”

  Down in the city was the popping sound of pistol fire. Other than pitched roofs scattered among treetops, nothing else of Sable was in view.

  With a small measure of soberness, Westen said, “If there is any wisdom among those men, they will turn their weapons upon themselves and end it. Better that than to chance which dervesh determines the manner of death.” He handed over the mortar, which Elario packed away. “We can spell here for a short time to let you rest and the horses eat. Then we must be off.” He slid off the boulder and went to Hobbe.

  This was not a place to make camp until tomorrow. If there were survivors of the search party, it gave them time to catch up. Elario returned the herbal case to his satchel and laid down in the grass, hoping the worst was behind them.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The ride to Cathul was uneventful. They traveled from morning to late afternoon, when Hobbe and Westen scouted out a place to weather the night. There were no towns or cities along this long-unused road, whose traffic was limited to jackrabbits and deer, and three horses bearing their riders south.

  Since Hobbe required no sleep, and Westen needed very little, they kept watch while Elario slept by the fire. Rather it was Hobbe who kept watch, and Westen went roving. Distrusting that there was nobody behind or ahead, he walked miles in the moonlight to ensure they were alone. Then he rode all day without a yawn. Nor did he eat or drink at any point, though he watched Elario consume his meals in curiosity.

  “What? Why do you watch me?” Elario asked one evening.

  “It is another thing I have forgotten,” Westen said. “What is it like?”

  How did one describe the taste of old beans, or any kind of beans? “It is disgusting,” Elario confessed. “The gravy is gritty and congealed, and the beans are either too mushy or too hard depending on the can. Has it been five hundred years since you ate?”

  “Oh, no. I ate three meals a day at first after I changed. That is a very hard habit to break. It trickled down to two meals a day, one meal a day, then one meal every other day. And then I just . . . stopped.” He shrugged ruefully. “You think I mock humanity, but humanity mocked me first. The act of eating became a mockery, as did going to bed and lying awake for seven or eight hours. Wearing a cloak became a mockery in the cold; the temperature makes little difference to me. Being human is what you are, the nature of your condition; to me, being human is to step upon a stage in a costume.”

  Elario offered a spoonful of the cold beans. He had been too hungry to warm them over the fire. “If you would like to try it?”

  Shaking his head, Westen said, “A waste when you need it and I do not.”

  “Would it have flavor to you?”

  “Yes, I can still enjoy flavor, yet I no longer experience hunger, or the relief at having it sated. Eating became a pointless exercise of the jaws. I exercise them pointlessly enough as it is in speaking. Isn’t that right, Hobbe? Oh, don’t answer me. You do not understand.�
��

  “You could always upgrade-” Hobbe began.

  “No. The world keeps changing while I stay the same. You’ll stay the same with me and there is more comfort in that than you can ever comprehend.”

  Elario swallowed on the spoonful with a grimace. To be without food would be far worse, but he was so sick of beans sitting heavily in his stomach and inciting windstorms in his bowels. Stubbornly grinding his jaws over the last of the can, he went to sleep and woke to a makeshift spit over the fire and a roasting rabbit. Westen had gone hunting in the night. Glutting himself on meat, Elario was in brighter spirits that day upon the endless road through nowhere.

  The dragon’s eye was mostly quiet. In its brief stirrings, which happened at any time of day or night, it showed fragments of times and places and people. Little of it made sense. Twice the images contained Westen: the first was him as a little boy of toddling years, his hand in a woman’s as she led him down the steps of that terraced garden, the second was as he was now, shouting within a melee of panicked men and women and children as they streamed down a road. Westen was forcing his way through them, but the surge was bearing him away no matter how hard he fought. Olan! Olan!

  Westen rode with him at times, instructing Elario on the many matters in which he was ignorant. He listed the regions where male herbal knackers were most prevalent, and which regions produced which knacks. The smallest city within the golden ring was Betala, and it was the only locale within Phaleros to produce musical knacks. “Pregnant women near term travel to Betala and bear their children there praying for a musical knack! Singers, composers, musicians, they are divinely glorious to listen to, and people pay fistfuls of silver for a seat at the best stage-houses, or gold for a private box. When mechanical men were new, people paid gold for their performances, but there is no heart in the perfect music of metal musicians. There is only a facsimile of heart, and a discerning ear picks up on it. It is the same with mechanical men programmed to jot stories for the newspapers.”

  “What are newspapers?” Elario asked.

  “Great merciless Elequa, this empty-headed farm boy!” Westen swore, and a new lesson was borne. Soon their conversation returned to the creative inferiority of mechanical men and the superiority of musical knacks, and then to how those knackers almost always burned themselves out. “Yes, it is scientific and musical knackers who destroy themselves fastest and oftenest, herbal knackers in a close third with mathematical knackers on their heels. Death knackers and dream knackers and elemental knackers rarely do, but there is far less temptation or opportunity.”

  Elario kept it to himself that he had never heard of several of those knacks, though he suspected Westen knew. “What about dervesh knackers? Did they burn themselves out with regularity?”

  “Less often than herbal knackers, but more often than death knackers,” Westen replied. “Almost all of the weaker ones burned out by their twenties, which was predictable.”

  “Not to a man who lives centuries after their time. How was this predictable?”

  Hobbe chuckled. It was a very mechanical laugh of three equal beats and expulsions of air. They looked to him quizzically upon the gelding. “I identified a joke, sirs, and activated my laugh track,” Hobbe said, pleased with himself.

  “Very good,” Westen said in a strained voice. “You got the joke faster than Elario and I.”

  There had been no joke. Westen gave Elario a look of amusement and said, “Imagine, if you will, that you are a weak dervesh knacker born on a humble, struggling farm in the decades before the Troubled Times. To be a dervesh knacker is to have riches within your grasp. People of means come to you requesting spelled objects to better their fortunes. A merchant woman who desires the worship of men wishes you to spell her necklace with abide energy. She places a pouch of gold and silver in your palm, and you do it to help your farm. Now no man but Dagen’s touched can look away from her, and she consumes their devotion for her perverted ends, whatever they may be: marriage, a title, money, power, a chance to dazzle a royal and bear his child. You care little which it is; you take the money and buy more land and a new team of horses. Then a noble couple who can bear no children offer you a yearly stipend of extreme size to charm their bodies into bearing fruit.”

  Astonished, Elario said, “I can do this?”

  “You can do this as a dervesh knacker by robbing another couple of their fertility. There is a reason I call this energy corrupted. For that yearly stipend, you do it. Of course you do it! You may never know who was robbed by your conjuring of this spell. Your parents will never have to work again. Your siblings will marry into landed merchant families, or even low nobles and receive the title of lord or lady. You now live in a grand home, not the grandest, but grand. Yet the stronger dervesh knackers around you have so much more . . .”

  This was a queer way to picture using a knack. Elario went where he was called, accepting small payments for his skill. Many could spare the silver bits or coppers; others could not, and paid him in baskets of eggs and bread, produce and jams, or feed for his horses. They sent fresh fish caught from the lake, or cuts of meat from their next slaughter to his home. The poorest of the poor provided his spring cleaning, mended his fences or clothing, fixed his roof or gave their labor in his fields as needed. The shame of not compensating the herbal knacker would be too great, and he would feel shame at withholding his knack for an inability to pay. That was not the way things were done below the Hopcross.

  Yet Westen was speaking of olden times, and richer people. “I become jealous,” Elario said, pretending to be this dervesh knacker of limited ability. “Jealous and greedy.”

  “As many did,” Westen said. “Rather than see all the luxuries that your skill has provided, you begin to mourn that you are in possession of only a weak knack for dervesh energies. You grow to resent your weakness for what it cheats you. You can’t imbue a sword with havok strength. That is beyond your limit. You can’t impart the long-lasting youth of a chingol to reverse time for an old man lusting after extra years. You can’t touch the energy of the circlet or the manush in your wildest dreams. People with more money and greater needs go to stronger knackers, leaving you to lesser work and lighter purses. Then a duke with a gambling habit arrives upon your stoop, wishing you to spell his ring for luck. Oh, but many have those rings, so you will need to use all of your energy to make this one even more powerful than theirs.”

  “And I use too much.”

  “You convince yourself that you can use a little more, just this once, and never again. Your family is depending on you to fund their lavish lifestyles. You are tired of your second-best home and carriage and comforts, even though it is far beyond what a commoner possesses. This is how knackers get caught out, whether they wield the ability to invent wonders such as aerials, herbal remedies to save lives, or dervesh creations to better a man’s cards at the expense of those around him. You channel too much energy into that nobleman’s ring, stepping beyond your limit . . . and it is gone. All of it is gone forever. Few weak knackers made it to their middle years with their abilities intact. Some burned out by the age of twenty. It is all too easy to burn out.”

  “This much I know.” Elario pivoted in the saddle at the dragon’s pull to peer into the woods. There were dragon bones deep beneath a distant patch of trees. Resisting the urge to turn his horse off the road, he asked, “Did herbal knackers live as well as dervesh knackers in those times?”

  “Herbal knackers were richer!” Westen exclaimed. “They went nowhere without a retinue of servants, and were often retained by noble families. The strongest of the strong worked for the royal family and went where they did. Your life would be quite different than it is now. Royal herbal knackers lived upon pillows while the herbs were gathered for them, and only rose when their knack was called for. Even today, had you been born an herbal knacker in the golden ring, your life would be one of ease, and you would have a list of stately clients to treat and no one else, for they could not afford you.
”

  “Where do commoners go when they are ill?”

  “They go to doctors.”

  “What are doctors? Is that the name of a sick-house? Doctors?”

  “Elequa, kill me now!” Westen cried to the heavens in outrage, but afterwards deigned to explain.

  The hills flattened gradually at their sides. Still they met nobody along this leaf-strewn road. On the afternoon of the fourth day, Elario spotted an aerial. High in the sky and no bigger than the nail upon his little finger, it disappeared into clouds.

  The next day, Westen took them into the trees. The road wound on to a village called Zavane. Drought had pushed its populace elsewhere long ago. Another road once linked Zavane to Cathul, but now it was pasture. They could not approach the city by that route, visible for miles.

  By midday, Cathul appeared in a break of the canopy. Smoke lifted from factories in hundreds of cocked plumes. Aerials were gliding over gray buildings beyond the factories, the top stories so high in the sky that the gods of the heavens could dance upon their roofs. Westen stopped to observe the aerials in quiet.

  Within a minute, he heeled his horse. “Good. Those are just cargo haulers and passenger carriers. Let’s get closer.”

  The trees ran all the way to the city limits, providing considerable cover even in their leaflessness. Westen took them within a half-mile of Cathul and then demanded that they all dismount. “Hobbe, strip the horses and chase them off.”

  “We aren’t taking the horses?” Elario said in surprise, swinging to the ground.

  “Trust me, southling, a man on horseback is becoming somewhat of a rarity in these cities. Most people take the trolley or hire a carriage to get around Cathul, or they ride the crawlers and snakes. There is not the room for every family to stable a horse or two.” He considered the earth. “This will throw off that Dragon of the Blood. We’ll walk on the thickest leaves while he chases hoof prints.”