Steampunk Hearts

by Jordan Reece

  A burble of upraised voices filled the air. Then it was only wind. A moment later, the voices returned. In and out they traded off with the wind, until Elario was unsure if he was hearing anything, or if it was just something from the dragon’s eye. Westen skirted around a tall spike of rock protruding upwards from the cliff, Elario rushing after and almost stumbling in surprise at the staircase that Westen was descending.

  It was a crude, twisting flight of narrow steps carved right into the rock. Like the gravel path in the hillocks, these stairs had been made to avoid paying a toll on a kingsroad. But no wagon or horse could be brought down this. The passage was so uncomfortably narrow that Elario’s shoulders were brushing the sides. Westen and Hobbe had to go down sideways.

  The voices returned and they were unmistakably real, rebounding off the walls of the passage. “Colman! You have to leave it!” “Where’s Jacqua?” “Master Jon! Master Jon, what is happening? I’m scared!”

  The staircase twisted once more, and opened to the highest point of Achen’s Bridge. Elario flinched from the scene of bedlam upon it. Thousands of fades were upon the bridge from end to end, all of them fighting to get out of the city. Carriages were at a standstill, horses balking at the ruckus and unable to step through the crowds. Drivers whipped them, and shouted at pedestrians to get out of the way. They were soundly ignored, or simply unheard in the hysteria.

  “Elario, don’t just stand there!” Westen exclaimed.

  A hand landed on Elario’s back in three precise pats. “It is all right, Master Elario,” Hobbe said. Unwillingly, Elario walked into the craziness.

  Nobles surged among scholars, vespers, and common folk. Parcels and instruments and satchels were being dropped, or thrown over the railings. Families were broken apart, people pushing and shoving even between parents trying desperately to hold onto the hands of their children. Some fades were stained with blood; others were weeping and looking back to the valley. All on her own near Elario, a little girl with blonde ringlets cried tearfully, “Mama! Mama!”

  Elario took a step to the child by instinct, thinking to pick her up before she was trampled. Then he remembered. She had been dead for centuries. All of them were dead, the sun shining just a little through their bodies and belongings. He made himself walk past her and tried to block out her pathetic wails for her mother.

  It was hard to retain the knowledge that all of this was over when it was happening with so much life in front of him. When he heard their cries and felt their terror, and saw what they carried out of Nevenin as most precious to them, be it child, pet, jewels, weapons, or paintings. He was so caught up in it that he startled when Westen took his arm to guide him faster through the fray.

  The people of Nevenin ran through them. Elario saw them, but they did not see Elario or Westen or Hobbe. To be in their melee was terrible.

  Unconsciously, he tried to dodge them. But just as most of the carriages were unable to progress, he was unable to step around someone without getting in the way of another. People were knocked down, screaming as they were trod upon; horses spooked and reared. More and more was being dropped, coins and bracelets and clothing and books and trunks, so that husbands could hold onto wives and parents could pick up children. Scholars linked their arms to move in a giant knot around their youthful assistants, who were toting books and small statuary.

  Nursemaids from an orphanage unloaded from the back of a wagon trapped halfway up the bridge, taking one, two, even three crying babies into their arms, pleading for help with the rest; compassionate strangers seized them up and bore them on. No one could lift the laboring mother, who was also in the wagon bed. An old woman with a basket of herbs looked up to the cliffs in desperation, and then climbed into the bed to tend her as the nursemaids fled.

  Suddenly the fades ducked, shrieking. Blood flew from fresh gashes to rent their faces and arms. A boy of Nyca’s age was lifted up off the bridge by an invisible being. He kicked futilely as it hoisted him by the neck, his face turning purple from lack of air. His parents cried out, jumping to pull him down, but whatever had him flew over the railing and released him. The mother and father threw out their hands to catch him, even though he was far out of reach. “Kavven! Kavven, no! Elequa!”

  To treasure seek among this . . . Tears streamed down Elario’s cheeks as fades rushed through him in droves. He could do nothing but bear witness to their terror. It wasn’t real but it had been real, and every day, they lived it. They lived it and they died, again and again and again. Westen pulled him on.

  His boots sank through the backs of trampled people. He pierced through carriages, where noble families were hunkered down, too frightened to leave and their drivers having quit them. Two portly men clutched to one another, passing through Westen and Elario. “Elequa,” Elario prayed. “Great Elequa, mercy.”

  There was no mercy. There was only an animal desire to get out. Invisible dervesh attacked, people yanked off the bridge by their hair or tumbling down to be savaged. Some shattered like glass; others writhed as if struck with aithra bullets and their skin burst away from their bones. One man burned alive, a living torch of flame, and fell to ashes at the skirts of his wife and daughters.

  Elario had no fear of the aerial trailing closer; to be in the Shivves on a torturer’s table was preferable to this bridge of horror. Think of Hallowmas, think of home, think of anything . . . but nothing drew him away.

  Just as they came to the base of the bridge, the past snapped out of sight. Old, decrepit carriages were scattered about between the railings and in the road where the bridge terminated, most of them overturned and in pieces. Molded trunks and metal rods littered the ground. Swearing to be exposed, Westen yanked Elario over to a doorless carriage to take cover. They hid behind it with Hobbe.

  The outside of the carriage was a shimmering white. Atop it was a pedestal, but whatever was there had been removed, or fallen apart over time. “The queen’s carriage,” Elario said hoarsely, the dragon’s eye plucking out a story that he hardly wanted. She and her retinue had hidden upon her father’s estate during the attack. When they ran out of food, when no rescue showed, they decided to flee. This was as far as they made it before dervesh overwhelmed them.

  The aerial was in no hurry, still pottering through the sky at a relaxed speed. When it swung around to forge north, Westen sighed in relief. “They’re probably all wearing scope spectacles up there and arguing about if what they see is man, fade, or dervesh-”

  The fades returned as if summoned, running and screaming within the branches of the roads that joined at the bridge. In the homes framing a canal, people looked out in fright from balconies or yanked the curtains shut over windows. In the canal itself, two boats rode low in the water, the rowers beating off swimmers who were attempting to board. Fades even scrambled up drainpipes to collect upon the rooftops, having nowhere else to go. They stood back-to-back, holding kitchen knives and walking sticks as weapons.

  Westen took them in a southerly direction through the city, the past and present unfolding around them in turn. In an open doorway in one of the homes was a tiny gleam of a tarnished gold coin, which abruptly disappeared and then fell down as a gleaming one to the exact same place. It had tumbled out of the pocket of a man, who rushed through the doorway and vanished. Then the coin was tarnished again. Elario felt no temptation to retrieve it; to take something from this haunted city was to take its curse as well. He wanted nothing in his possession to remind him of Nevenin.

  “Why are there not dervesh everywhere on these roads with all of the noise from the fades?” he asked, for they were encountering none.

  “The dervesh have learned over the centuries that it is just that. Noise and no meat,” Westen said. “I expect many of them are trailing the aerial.”

  Then it was good they were going in the opposite direction. A woman on horseback went through Elario, and then the past faded once more. Although it was good to be briefly spared the sights and sounds of the massacre, it had the poor
er side effect of making it all the more obvious that people were in Nevenin. Luckily, the aerial remained on its northward path. It stood to reason that they did not have Westen’s knowledge of the very specific area to produce dervesh knackers. Only the general location, which was a boon.

  Fades took to life. Overwhelmed, Elario grew numb to their distress. Carriage after carriage flashed through him; servants dressed in livery ran with their lords’ goods in hand. A trio of merrymakers, bizarrely, was playing music and singing as they jigged about in their exodus. Their clothing reeked of alcohol. People hung out of windows to beg for news from those passing by below. Should they stay? Should they go? None of them knew yet that it didn’t matter. Their fates were sealed, one and all.

  The canals fell behind them. Estates spread out and the number of fades lessened to the members of single households careening past. Other households were bunkering down where they were, servants shutting and locking gates to drives and guards climbing upon the garden walls to stand there with swords and bows. They looked through Elario, who felt like the ghost among them.

  Westen slowed and gestured with his pistol to one of the drives. “There it is.”

  Carved in the rock wall beside the gate was REPSE. Shaken a little from his numbness, Elario looked through the cobwebbed bars of the gate. Nature had taken back the gardens and infiltrated the mansion. This was one of the homes of his family, as incredible as that seemed; perhaps some of its members had gone by him unknowingly in a carriage.

  A head came over the wall and whistled.

  They recoiled into the road. It was the bug-eyed, snouted head of a havok beast, which began to elbow its way over. Westen shot it, but the disintegrating head was instantly replaced by six more. Their metal chest-plates and weapons scraped upon the rock as they hauled themselves up. Then there were even more, scrabbling at the wall and gate.

  Elario fired through the bars as Westen and Hobbe dispatched those on the wall. Unaware of the battle, two fades stood atop the posts, their eyes going out to a speeding carriage. A third guard hoisted himself up to join them, and a havok hoisted itself through him. Elario aimed and fired at that one, destroying the dervesh but leaving the guard unhurt.

  Another whistle made the hair rise on the back of his neck.

  A second army of havok beasts was charging down the road, the cracks of the pistols having concealed the thunder of their footsteps. Even more startling was a nechto, crawling along on her elbows, dragging her legs, and scarcely ten paces from Elario. She had appeared out of nowhere! He shouted and fired into her head.

  “Go!” Westen bellowed, hastily reloading his pistols.

  Elario ran away from the Repse estate. Cracks and whistles and a tremendous crash echoed in the air, followed by a plaintive cry. “Sir! Sir, I require assistance!”

  He spun around. He had thought Westen and Hobbe were right behind him, but they were not. The gate had fallen into the road, pinning Hobbe beneath it as a havok balanced unsteadily upon the bars. Westen was firing furiously upon the flood of beasts dropping over the wall with one pistol, and firing into the army racing down the road with his other pistol. One by one, they disintegrated. But he was going to run out of bullets in the chambers before he ran out of havok.

  A bullet blasted apart the beast upon the bars. Elario ran back for them as Hobbe heaved the gate up and rolled clumsily to the side in an attempt to get out from it. Westen ran out of bullets and chambered them hurriedly while his mechanical man struggled to free himself.

  Elario had three bullets left in his pistol. He fired as he ran, the first bullet taking out a beast dropping from the wall. The second he fired into the advancing army, erasing an archer about to let loose, and the third did the same to a beast with a sword. Westen stepped to his side with a laugh, pistols snapping up. He felled the beasts in a fusillade of bullets as Elario reloaded.

  Metal squealed, Hobbe finally escaping the gate. He let it drop and clambered upwards. “Come on, Hobbe, up and at them!” Westen cried. “Where are your pistols?”

  “Forgiveness, sir. They are under the-”

  A lance punched through Hobbe’s gut.

  The mechanical man’s eyes flared and dimmed, his internal connections severed. The lance had not been thrown from the road, and no more havok were scaling the wall. One of the beasts stepped out from the drive with a malicious smile upon its snouted face. Westen let out a terrible cry and shot it as gold coins spilled out from Hobbe’s scuffs in place of blood. Falling stiff-legged to the ground, he stilled.

  Too late, Elario thought in shock, still in the act of closing his reloaded pistol. Westen threw himself down at Hobbe’s body, ripping at his clothes.

  “We have to run, Westen! There are still more of them coming!” Elario fired on those in the lead, backing away as he did. “Westen!”

  Westen got up from the body and they ran, swerving as lances and axes were thrown past them. The road curled around the bend into a driving circle. Fire had taken the property beyond it, reducing most of the great house and all of the carriage house to rubble. “This way!” Westen said, leaping a fallen tree that lay between them and the house.

  They climbed over the heaps of fallen stones that once formed the front wall. The multiple floors had collapsed down like pancakes, creating a sea of slabs and timbers that rocked beneath their feet. Only a corner of the house was upright, and that was where Westen headed. The fire damage was still extensive there, gutting the rooms to hollowed-out gourds four stories high.

  Rocks tumbled from the heaps as the dervesh mounted them. Barely concealed by the charred walls of this first-floor room, Elario stepped away from the gaping doorway. Westen lowered to one knee and opened a metal grate in the floor. “Go in,” he hissed.

  Stairs to a cellar were below the grate. Elario went down them, his pistol pointing into the dimness. Westen came in after him and brought the grate down silently, locking it with a draw-bar as the slabs rocked and ground against one another outside the room.

  They stayed still upon the stairs as the ruins of the house were searched. Within a minute, several beasts entered the room. Dust and tiny pebbles sifted through the slim openings in the grate. With whistles and gruff barks, the havok communicated to one another as they stomped about, one jumping up and down in an attempt to reach the second floor.

  The light from the grate extended no further than the step below him. Elario put a hand over his satchel, knowing exactly where he had stowed his strike-sticks, but the scratch and hiss would give them away. Anything could be farther down the stairs, his mind flicking to the apparitions of the sisters, and he was blind.

  Hobbe. Dear Elequa, Hobbe. They had left him on the road. Though he had not been real, Elario’s heart counted him as such. He would miss the company of the out-of-date mechanical man.

  A finger tapped at the grate.

  A blackened nail quested into an opening. Elario closed his dragon’s eye to conceal the glint. The havok above was trying to pry the grate open, but its finger was too thick to get all the way through. Another nail sank down, the beast straining above for purchase.

  Whistling. The nails slipped away.

  The beasts lumbered out of the corner room in response to the call. When they were gone, Westen produced the lantern from his belongings and lit it. He proceeded down the stairs. Keeping the pistol lowered but his finger on the trigger, Elario went after him to a wine cellar.

  Racks arched overhead. Wine bottles were chained in some of them, the necks and stoppers coated in dust. Passing beneath them, they turned into a side room where buckets held empty bottles. Westen listened at a door for some time before opening it to a passage.

  Torch holders protruded from the walls at regular intervals. They were the only furnishment. “Where does this go?” Elario whispered as they walked through the passage.

  “It was a servants’ passage for inclement weather,” Westen said. “Lord Elvutt built the four homes at the end of this road for his children and their f
amilies. The houses were linked through their wine cellars. The other passages have caved in, but this one holds.”

  Fades flickered into view of two servants, the women whispering frantically to one another as their skirts swished about their ankles. One was holding a bust, poorly wrapped in a sheet; her companion bore a basket of food and two dripping flasks of water, which were strung around her neck by a leather cord. They hurried ahead of Elario and Westen, and disappeared.

  “I am sorry about Hobbe,” Elario said quietly.

  “He was metal pieces and programs,” Westen replied with indifference. “Nothing more.”

  “Nothing more, but still you ran to check his wound, and see if he could be saved.”

  Westen’s shoulders hunched; he was grieving Hobbe, but loathed to admit it. “In time, a very long time, he would have aged and come apart, too. It was foolish of me to make a friend of him, knowing this. It was foolish of me to run to him, when I should have had my eyes upon you.”

  “It was human, Westen. He was one of us, metal notwithstanding.”

  “I cannot afford the price of humanity, yet neither can I elude it.” Westen rubbed at his eyes to stop himself from crying on Hobbe’s behalf. “They leave and they leave and they leave, and I stay. It was stupid of me to . . .”

  “What was stupid?”

  “I wasted two seconds in wresting this from him.” He showed Elario a curious piece of hammered metal that was riddled with grooves. “Hobbe’s memory chip. I should have left it.”

  “Oh, for the love of Elequa! Then he is not gone, Westen! His body is, but you can install that in another mechanical man and take your comfort in him.”

  “I should not. It will only make it harder in the end.”

  “You will,” Elario demanded. “You refuse to do that and you’ll lose even more of yourself.”

  The connecting wine cellar was larger and finer than the first. Patterned tiles were upon the floor and a chandelier hung down over a long table. But Elario’s eyes were affixed to the treasure trove to cover it. A mountain range of gold coins were stacked two and three feet high at the table’s center, ringed by ornate copper candlesticks. Around those were chests of jewelry and bundles of silver-gilt spoons. Six silver trumpets were placed horn down in a cluster, cobwebs lacing them together.