Steampunk Hearts

by Jordan Reece

  “Where are the surrounding staffs?” Elario asked, his voice trembling. Now that he was no longer running, the breeze was giving him chills in his damp clothes.

  “There is the one you saw in Davenah. In the northern hills, the staff is close by, but when it was fired from the aerial, it landed upon its side rather than pointed down into the earth. The result, queerly, is the dervesh do not and cannot travel south from that staff. That is the one I foolishly tried to break about two hundred years ago. All of them are seeded so that if a person attempts to interfere with a staff, a good number of the dervesh are instantly retracted and spill out all at once to attack. I never tried that again. They may not be able to kill me, but they can trap me for eternity if the right one gets hold.”

  He returned to his description of the locations of the various staffs. “Ahead of us is a mile of freedom before you strike my rocks, and then a long walk past that you find the staff’s crater. It was shot through the roof of a village forge. I have never located the staff to the south. For all I know, it is underwater. But I marked the range of the dervesh and they cannot trespass here. Even the sanga do not fly over this land; they pace the sides, and in a spiteful temper when they’ve seen me but were unable to pursue.”

  That was good to hear, but soldiers would have no trouble stepping over those rocks. Yet there had been no sign of them. Perhaps they were all dead in the crash of the aerial and the sanga attack. “Is it safe to have a cook fire?” Elario asked.

  “As long as we stamp it out before you go to bed. Here we are, our accommodations for the night.” Westen vanished around a curve. Disliking to have him out of sight, even in a protected cove, Elario hustled after him.

  Westen had stopped at two enclosed wagons with their yokes down, both nestled in a small space between hillocks. An old campfire was between them. They looked like they had been abandoned only yesterday. One wagon was a soft butter yellow, the second as blue as a summer sky. Even in the dimness, their colors glowed. Wondering at them, Elario ran his fingers over the yellow. It was not paint upon wood, but the color of the wood. Neither weather nor insect had done damage in five hundred years. Dirt collected upon the windows, and that was all. “This is a knack skill.”

  “Peddler families roamed throughout Phaleros, bearing their children in places that none have ever called home. Some were dragon-blessed with odd abilities that lived one lifetime, never to be seen again.” Westen turned the handle of the blue wagon’s door. “Sleep in there. Hobbe and I will watch the night.”

  “Forgiveness, sir,” Hobbe said, inclining his head politely. “I need to shut down soon to reorganize my programs. The magna-draw is out of date and fragmented my-”

  Westen cut him off with an order to begin the reorganization. Sitting down cross-legged beside the yellow wagon, the mechanical man’s eyes rolled upwards and his body stilled to a statue.

  They worked around him, gathering sticks and dry leaves to start a fire. Its light shined within the wagon, the door still open to air it out. The small but neat living space had a berth, wash bowl, and empty racks for goods and tools. “They got on their horses and fled,” Elario said, looking into the wagon and into the past simultaneously. “A party of nine, and four of them children. I can’t see if they made it.”

  “Then let us assume they did,” Westen said. “And today their descendants live below the Hopcross.”

  “We have spice ledgers in the attic of my home.” Elario sat at the little fire to warm himself. “Whoever ran south of my family back then, and made it . . . they must have thought they would one day return, and needed those ledgers to continue their trade. Who was the Repse family in your time? Did you know them?”

  “I did, though distantly. The patriarch of the family was Averus Repse, who eventually turned over the management of the business to his son and daughter. He was near a century when the Great Cities were attacked. The Repses should have been granted title, but . . . Well, they were somewhat unrefined, of no noble connections or blood, nor were they inclined to cozy up to power or involve themselves in games of favor. In his old age, Averus still maintained a spice garden. He had servants for that, but trusted his work to no one.”

  Westen crouched and held out his hands to the fire in imitation of Elario. Then he shook his head with half a smile and sat back. “Fetero Repse was the son, graying and florid-faced; Challas was the daughter and Fetero’s twin. I saw them at various events. There were many Repse nieces and nephews and cousins whose names I cannot tell you, for I never knew them. Fetero had children, three sons and a daughter, though only two lived to adulthood; Challas refused to trade the Repse name for another in marriage and had her daughters in hand-fast so that the legacy of Repse continued through her. Back then, it was becoming common for women from wealthy merchant families to choose hand-fast over marriage. Unless they married nobility and took a title, they retained their original surname. Does the dragon’s eye withhold your own history from you?”

  “It nudges me to one of those hand-fasted daughters. But no vision or voices, which I wouldn’t want anyway.” Elario shrugged.

  “You are the bloodline of Repse!” Westen reprimanded him. “You cannot appreciate the significance of your own surname as I can. I will show you the name still carved into the wall around the Repse estate in Nevenin.”

  Elario felt a touch of another mind in his own and turned southward. “There is a dragon in the earth close by.”

  “It is not the one we want, so we shall let it rest.”

  They made a weak soup of dried meat and beans in water. Elario ate it all, his clothes drying until the chill no longer discomforted him. Wetting a cloth, Westen tenderly cleaned the blood from his cheek. “Does it hurt?”

  “I barely felt it when it happened, nor do I feel much now.”

  “It is shallow, but you should heal it.”

  “If it is shallow, why bother?”

  “The smell of blood . . .” Westen contemplated his words at length. “Just heal it, my farm boy. Out here, it is better not to smell of blood.” He yawned.

  Elario took out his herbal case. “I’ll keep watch for now. You need your hour of sleep. Do you dream in that hour?”

  “I do, sometimes.” Westen took the mortar and pestle away to grind the sand-stone, pinch of sealeaf, and a petal of spring tides. When it was powder, he gave it to Elario and spilled water into it from the flask. Elario stirred it into paste and dumped it into his hand. Pressing it to his cheek, a very slight soreness subsided.

  Westen unfurled his bedroll and laid down atop it. “One hour, and you’ll have the night to recuperate.” He was asleep as soon as his head hit his folded arms.

  The fire danced and shivered with the wind. Downing the last spoonful of the stew, Elario wiped the bowl and spoon clean and packed them away. His legs ached from the run, and he stood to stretch. Already the sticks were falling to ash, so he shoveled earth and pebbles over the flames until the fire was extinguished.

  His nerves had settled as a side effect of the concoction to heal his cheek. Though he was within the Wickewoods, the night was not so unfriendly. The dervesh roamed far away, so far that their sounds were indistinguishable from the night. As for the soldiers . . . It was for them that he had to watch.

  He crept past the wagons to the tallest hillock and climbed through the grass to its modest summit. In the darkness of the early night, he was unable to make out signs of cook fires. Unwillingly, he stretched for the dragon’s mind within his to see where those soldiers were, the ones to survive the crash, if there were any. The dragon was silent.

  Strange. Strange that Westen’s lord of old longed for a bodyguard who neither ate nor slept, one frozen in a state of youth and strength, and one who could not die. Elario should have remarked upon that comment of Westen’s at the time it was voiced; he simply listened without question or true comprehension instead. There was a part to this story that Westen restrained.

  Elario puzzled over it upon the hillock. Westen
could have a knack. He had just spoken of the queer knacks that appeared only once. But then the knack displayed itself in precisely the ways the lord requested? With the exception of that scant hour of sleep, Westen was a perfect bodyguard, immortal and unstoppable. Yet he was born a normal boy, who ate and learned and grew as all children did. He was an at’Inamon of the fifth generation, born presumably at home, not in a peddlers’ wagon roving through nowhere.

  A dervesh could have done it to him in the fall of the Great Cities, yet again . . . It was too queer, too coincidental for a dervesh to transform Westen almost exactly into the lord’s vision. There were many more dervesh than Elario knew, but still, this scenario niggled at him as unlikely.

  A wild thought struck that Westen was himself a dervesh, but Elario rejected the notion. There was no staff that called Westen home. They had traveled from Drouthe to east of Davenah, for Elequa’s sake! The reach of the dragonwood staffs was not as wide as that.

  His nature was indisputably a human’s besides. Dervesh were not of a nature to sit and converse about the past, the taste of beans, or plot their own destruction with the firing of dragon bones. Neither did they save madcaps, nor swim through a cold river in desperation to spare the life of an infant. Dervesh hungered for flesh. Westen did not.

  Yet he lived. He lived like a dervesh. He lived and lived and lived as they did, forever unchanging in a constantly changing world. He lived like a machine lived.

  Mechanical. No, he wasn’t a mechanical creation. Elario had held this man in his arms, and stroked every part of his body. But was he in some small, hidden part a machine? A machine was what the Lord Inamon truly wished for. A man or woman with a scientific knack could have wedded a human body to a machine, perhaps, aithra binding them together so that the machine’s strengths overrode the human weaknesses.

  Elario was well beyond the boundaries of his own knowledge. This was the realm of fancies, but here was a reason for the untiring longevity. Maybe, like Hobbe, Westen was reorganizing his programs in his hour of rest. The side of him that was human dreamed as it went on performing maintenance.

  Hobbe was so clearly a machine. A complex machine, and a personable one, but still a machine. His words were selected from internal scripts, broken and recombined as needed. However, it was Westen’s undeniably human side that interacted with the world. The machine remained on a lower level out of sight, engaged in the processes to sustain him and little more.

  Did Westen know what he was? Or was the information erased from his mind at certain time intervals, like the mechanical beings in the Cathul brothel? He might have arrived at the answer millions of times in his life, only to have it instantly erased from his memory. Returning him to the beginning of the mystery of his existence.

  A yellow searchlight glowed in the trees to the south. It was moving.

  Elario dropped to his stomach in the grass the instant he realized what it was. There had been survivors from the crash. Their fate upset him less than in Sable. These soldiers brought themselves here, after all, chasing Elario into the Wickewoods. He bore no responsibility for their presence. Still, he steeled himself for the inevitable screaming when the soldiers encountered dervesh out there in the darkness.

  The moon was full, shining down on a handful of smaller hillocks in that direction, and a hint of a clearing before the trees. The speck of the searchlight was so distant in those trees that he lost track of it repeatedly. The number of survivors had to be small, since there was just the one light. He needed to slide down the slope and shake Westen awake to warn him, but every time Elario started to do it, the light vanished again. Then it returned along the southern border of the cove, sometimes closer to the hillocks, other times farther away, and gradually moving east. Remembering the glint of his dragon’s eye, Elario shut it but kept the second eye trained to the light’s progress.

  A dark object flew into the sky and winged away, an owl or a dervesh. Then the glow of the yellow searchlight dwindled to nothing and remained gone. There was no reason to wake Westen for that, Elario decided. He would be up soon enough.

  Several minutes passed. The dragon bones tugged at him again, and the dragon within Elario responded with a poignant swell of wistfulness. How much the two dragons were longing for kinship . . . Elario wrestled half-heartedly with the impulse to bring them together, and then it overpowered him. Taking care to be quiet, he crept down the slope to the gravel road. He trailed after the pull, his boots snapping the grass as he wound around the hillocks.

  Despite the strength of the lure, his rationality held sway where the land flattened. He hid around the curve of the last hillock to scan the short stretch of field beyond. Westen’s rock border pimpled the grass just paces from where the trees began.

  No one was there. No one was anywhere. The searchlight was truly gone.

  At least the dragon within him never had a need to linger over the bones. It wanted Elario to stand above them for a short while, and then the urge diminished. After that, he would quick-step back to their campsite. No reason for Westen to learn that he went off to the bones for a visit when it was going to be so brief.

  He slipped out of his hiding spot and scuttled over the grass to the bones, shoulders hunched and ears attuned for trouble. Coming to the burial place, he rejoiced in the dragon’s pleasure. Here was home; here was comfort; here was kin. Elario had never been here, but he took solace in the grass and trees and rocks, the hillocks at his back, the woods before him, as if they were as familiar as the sights of Alming.

  Is he ever coming home, Papa?

  Yes, Nyca. I believe he will. He may have met some trouble on the road, delaying him, but no news is good news. Right?

  Yes, Papa.

  Perhaps he went on an expedition to retrieve an herb from elsewhere. He will be sorry to have missed Hallowmas.

  We can make the feast foods for him, and I can tell him the merrymaker’s riddles.

  He will like that.

  Hallowmas had begun. The house was decorated in greenery and scented candles, his work table cleared for a holiday altar. Over at the Sixes common room, a merrymaker was enchanting her audience with the lost ballads. Her assistants worked puppets as she sang. Conton Evry passed out sweets to the children, who were clustered together at the merrymaker’s feet.

  Elario smiled at Nyca’s hesitation. As Yens went to the bar for a mug of ale, the boy held back in the doorway. His eyes settled worshipfully upon Daisa at’Salandar, who was holding two empty mugs and wearing an apron over her dress. All of the six at’Salandar daughters were beauties. Daisa was the youngest of the brood, and the only one still unmarried. For the last couple of years, she had worked in the Sixes as a server.

  She was pausing near the door to the kitchen to catch a verse of the song. You shoot too high, boy, Elario thought in amusement. Daisa was four years older than Nyca. The coy purse of her bowtie lips and her overly generous bosom made all of the Alming boys abandon reason. The joke was on them, for Daisa was so disinterested in turn that Elario wondered if she was touched by Kaliope.

  The song ended and the audience broke into applause. Daisa slipped into the kitchen just as Nyca took a step to her. The assistants gave the merrymaker her juggling balls. The first one flew up to the rafters, and as it came down, Elario returned to this lonely field in the Wickewoods.

  The searchlight was back.

  The searchlight was back, and barely twenty paces from the rock border. Elario startled and stumbled over his own boots, crashing down into the grass. If the soldiers hadn’t seen him there before, they had surely heard him now! Scrambling up, he was turning to flee into the hillocks when he noticed something queer about the searchlight.

  No voices. No footsteps. It was just a light, moving on its own through the woods. Then it was gone.

  He blinked away the after-image of the yellow orb. When he opened his eyes, it was right on the other side of the border. This was no light but fire, a yellow orb of fire hanging aloft in the air, beautiful a
nd mesmerizing.

  A dim part of his mind was relieved that the orb wasn’t blue. Why? What was the significance of it being blue? He could not recall.

  Sparks flew up from the orb’s highest point, lighting the trees and evanescing. In a matter of seconds, it changed, the orb stretching into a fine cloak made of snapping yellow flames. A man’s face took shape above it. His features were exquisitely beautiful, so beautiful that tears stung in Elario’s eyes. His brows were straight lines over stunning, reddish-green eyes, his nose was straight, and his lips parted in a sultry smile. Flames crackled along his cloak, which hung open over a bare, muscled chest. Sparks rippled up the soft fall of his pale hair and nestled at his crown.

  The man of flesh and flame held out his hand and nodded with encouragement.

  “Elario?”

  Paying the distant call no heed, Elario drifted closer to the rocks. He was hard in his trousers. The man knew that; he had caused it, he was going to take care of it, and all would be well. All would be beyond well. They had been meant all their lives for this moment, this meeting, by some divine ordinance . . .

  He took the man’s hand and their fingers entwined. A thrill went through him at the warmth in the touch. There was such softness and understanding in those lovely eyes, Elario’s heart an open book for this stranger to read. Hardly a stranger! First they would lay together in a bed of moss, a carnal celebration of the end to their separation, and afterwards they-

  “Elario!”

  His upper arm was caught. Drawn roughly backwards, which pulled his hand out of the man’s, Elario knocked his heel against a rock and fell against Westen. Westen dragged him bodily into the field. With a start, Elario saw that he had gone over the border unaware. He had been about to walk into the woods with a dervesh!