Steampunk Hearts

by Jordan Reece

  Rubbing at his throbbing ear as he held on, Elario asked, “Don’t tell me you have any of that dervesh energy within you?”

  “No,” Westen said in resignation. “Not that one.”

  They careened on unstoppably, Elario’s teeth rattling at the jounces from each chunk of ice and pothole the cart sped over. At the horizon was Olehalem, its highest buildings forming a dark, uneven line against the backdrop of brightening sky. Miles of land lay between the pass and the city. Hills and valleys, flat swathes of fields, there were ribbons of woods, creeks, and roads running through them. Here and there were farmhouses, defiant against time or conceding to it.

  This was where the dervesh knackers had been born, so somewhere down there were the dragon bones. The flying dervesh screamed once more, its cry not as ear-splitting this time. Engaged in pursuing the soldiers, it was letting the cart hurtle on unbothered. Elario surveyed the land below, reaching for that sensation of kin as the wind whipped at his face.

  No. Not here.

  “Oh, gods have mercy,” Westen said under his breath.

  They were racing for the bottom of the pass where the road returned to level. Leveled and curved, Elario saw. Perhaps they could have thrown themselves to the side of the cart to shift its course and stay upon the road around that curve, but the way was blocked. A number of totems had rolled down the slope, and were gathered there in a heap that stretched from side to side.

  They were going to hit the statues. Whispering a prayer, Westen slid an arm over Elario’s chest and braced them against the cart.

  The front wheels struck a totem of Elequa, and they were airborne.

  Though everything happened so very fast, it also went in slow motion. The arm was torn away as the cart disappeared from beneath them. Elario flew into the foliage along the twist in the road, branches snapping painfully against his back and side. He was being whipped around and around, neither knowing if he was up or down or otherwise since his vision had smeared to tumbling colors and indistinct shapes.

  Crashing onto his backside in a cushion of matted leaves, he flailed for purchase as he dropped swiftly down a ravine. The creek at the bottom was frozen over at the edges, but there was dark water in the middle. He yelled and dug in his heels, clawed at the earth, anything to slow himself down.

  In a tumult of leaves and rocks, he stopped with one boot upon the ice. It cracked at the weight, dropping his foot into shallow water. Yanking away from it, he gasped for air and sat by the creek too stunned to move.

  He hurt all over, although nothing felt broken. Whether he should praise Elequa for sparing him, or curse Elequa for hurling him, was a matter too complicated for his brain to parse at the moment.

  Dervesh. He should not just sit here and make himself easy pickings. Heaving himself over, he pushed up to his feet and brushed off his clothes. His satchel had been ripped off in the flight, but incredibly, the pistol was still down the back of his trousers. He was lucky, all things considered, that it hadn’t shot him in the buttock or worse when he landed.

  “Westen?” he called.

  A groan. “Elario? Are you still alive?”

  The satchel had slid partially beneath a sticker bush. Elario reclaimed it, taking care not to get his fingers pricked. He staggered away from the creek, following the sound of the voice. Halfway up the ravine was Westen, who was pressed to the spiny trunk of a tree. They had been hurled twenty paces and more off the road.

  The flying creature was still circling at the top of the pass, screaming and shooting its white bars of ice fire; the pistols, so loud at close range, were reduced to puny pops. Nobody was pursuing them yet; the decline of the pass was devoid of movement.

  Checking over his head for scratches, Elario found himself to be in relatively good order. “Are you all right?” he asked Westen.

  Westen was thrashing about to free his trousers from the spines. Fabric tore and he stumbled away from the tree. “My immortality broke my fall.”

  “Oh, don’t be a pest here. Now where? Where do we start the search?”

  Westen brushed his long hair away from his face, his plait having come undone, and withdrew the ampoule of elvrash oil. It was still whole. Tucking it away, he said, “That is up to you.”

  “We cannot lumber about until I sense something!”

  “Elario, that is exactly what we have to do. It may take a day, or only an hour. It may take five minutes or not even that. It all depends on what you sense.”

  He sensed nothing. “Well, let us get out of this ravine and point out to me the places where the dervesh knackers were born. The bones are definitely not around here.”

  “You see?” Westen said good-naturedly. “You have already saved me a century or two in digging around this spot. Do you need a moment to be certain?”

  “No. If there were bones anywhere around this location, the dragon’s eye would be calling to it and the bones calling back.”

  They crossed the creek at its narrowest point and scrambled up the ravine to a field. Dawn was pink in the east. With leaves falling out of the folds of his clothing, Westen said, “We remain within the bounds of Nevenin where we stand. Only one dervesh knacker, of those I traced, was born on the other side of the pass. That was Sevelio upon the southeastern cliffs, very close to the river. All the rest were upon this land before us.”

  “You told me that one dervesh knacker was the daughter of merrymakers.”

  “Chaissa Quane. Their wagon broke down as they drove for Olehalem.”

  “On that road? The pass that we were just traveling?”

  “No.” Westen took a moment to look around them, above and below and behind. “There is another road that passes between these cities. It runs alongside the river. She was born just off that road, in the shade of three blooming dragontrees below a hill. The description became part of a poem about her life. But before you say that both of these places are near the river, the Flett farm is not.”

  Westen pointed in the direction of Olehalem’s western side. “He was weak, as was his grandson, hardly dervesh knackers at all. As for the Prens knackers, they were born just past this field. We could walk there in three minutes. At’Watten is more difficult to place, but most likely it was over there-”

  “In Alming, herbal knackers are women,” Elario said as Westen’s finger wavered nearer to the river. “No one remembers a male herbal knacker before my time.”

  “What is your point?”

  “What if this knack came to me only because the dragon bones rest on my own property? The eye has shown me this. My mother stood right above them while she was pregnant with me. Even then, all it granted me was a weak knack. That particular dragon bestows a knack strongly linked to sex, and only proximity overrode it with me. The women herbal knackers were born all over Alming. Everywhere from a room in the Sixes to the Generli farm on the opposite side of town.”

  “Dervesh knackers were mostly men, another skill strongly linked to sex.” Westen’s eyes lit up with understanding. “We need to consider where the three women dervesh knackers were born.”

  “Yes!”

  “I can only say for certain where the merrymakers’ daughter took her first breath, and guess strongly at the second. But . . .” His voice trembled with excitement that he fought mightily to restrain. “The at’Wattens were part of a labor crew at the time of her birth. The usual location of the tent camp was a clearing near that very same road at the riverside. It is not far from where Quane was born. But it is impossible to narrow it down further from that unless the dragon’s eye shows it to you.”

  “And the third woman?”

  “She is of no use to us. Both Nevenin and Olehalem are recorded as her place of birth, with no further descriptors.”

  With assurance, Elario said, “If that dragon worked like the one in Alming does, then we should be hunting for the bones over there by the river. It gave those women power since they were physically close to the bones, whereas it did not matter so much for the men. As we
ll you told me that Quane was the only strong dervesh knacker among those women. The dragon must be that way! It must be right around the place where she was born! Take me there.”

  “Lower your voice,” Westen said, not to dampen his excitement but remind him of where they were. To accentuate his point was a dull pounding of feet.

  They retreated into the trees at once. With a minute, an army of havok beasts ran down the road to the pass. Grunting and whistling, clutching their weapons, there was eagerness in their bug-like eyes to see who trespassed upon their territory. Elario held his breath as the first of them vanished around the curve.

  Through a break in the trees he spied the aerial, which had flown back to the pass to glide above it. The screaming, winged creature was nowhere in sight now. If even one of those soldiers had survived, he or she might know which way Elario and Westen had gone.

  They were going to do this. They were going to find the precise spot in the earth where those bones lay below, and this would end. It would end for Elario at least, his part in it, but he could live his life in the knowledge that one day it would end for everyone. Westen would see to it.

  Still, time felt shorter than ever. They had to find and mark this spot, and then get away. Once the last of the havok army went by, they hurried into the field for the river.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  He wheeled above a magnificent table carved of dragonwood, light twinkling along the radiant purple flares through the dark surface, seven faces in shadow seated there – if we fail to act, my king, I fear a coup – A hand struck the table, a flare crossing beneath the ringed fingers and a roar of rage breaking over their heads – against me, they have always been against me, so I will be against them, I will -

  Wrenched through the window, he spun down to the earth where weary, blood-stained travelers were trickling out of the trees to the foothills, day by day, backs hunched and cloaks tight against the wind, this was the Hopcross before it was the Hopcross and a shout went up when some stalking dervesh disintegrated in its pursuit – we will not survive this winter, Elequa has turned their back upon us –

  A shelter lifted where now the Sixes stood, and he reeled back to rooftops rising in Briars and Winchistie and Jumario and Ballevue. Hunters and trappers were flocking into the mountains in search of meat since they could not clear fields to plant, fishers were sawing through the ice of the lakes, they were dying of cold and dying of hunger and dying of wounds but some were still there in spring, alive and persevering against this wilderness and he was yanked up, yanked up and thrown through the hull of an aerial – down the pass, ma’am, they went down the -

  “Elario?”

  His name snapped him back out of the hull and retracted him over Prinzio’s Pass, soaring above the hill where he saw the cart flying down, there was the ravine where they landed and he looked out to the river – Elario –

  There they were below, their two heads dark and light, Westen moving to him because Elario had suddenly stopped walking. Spinning in the air, he swept down and collided into his own body so hard that it knocked the wind from him.

  He gasped and became aware of the smallest flicker at the farthest edge of his mind.

  No. He had felt that a moment ago. He felt nothing now, having stepped beyond where the sensation occurred.

  When had Westen said his name? Was it a memory? Was it happening now, or was it in the future? Elario stood uncertainly in the grass, unable to get his bearings, the feathered yellow tips rasping against his legs in the breeze. There would be snow tonight, no soft dusting that melted within hours. A snap-winter but not a long or hard winter, that would be next year . . .

  He had sensed the bones. Taking a step backwards, he strained for that flicker.

  Kin, he thought. Kin to me.

  “Elario?”

  Westen was stepping with him. The first call of Elario’s name was a memory of the future. “Is it the dragon?” Westen asked. – mark it, he was almost shaking in his excitement to mark the ground over the bones, and then the hard part of this journey would become even harder but he would be back when the soldiers were gone, he would be back in spring, in summer, in autumn, even if he only won a shovelful of earth upon each visit he had all the time in the world one day -

  “I felt it somewhere, just a little.” Elario took another step backwards. “No.”

  “Perhaps you are not in exactly the right place. Take one more step back?”

  Elario did. “Nothing.”

  “Now to your left.”

  “Nothing.” He went to the right without waiting for Westen’s bid.

  There it was again, a flicker so miniscule that he almost missed it. “My dragon feels it, if only a hint.”

  He took another step and nodded. Here was the trail. “Is there a hill in this direction?”

  There were – hills, there were hills between them and the river, but precious few dragontrees were around those hills and Elario was going in the right direction . . . if dervesh chased them off before they found it then Westen still had a far smaller place in which to dig -

  The dragon soared again upon the sea of time. There was Ruzan, the palace in flames against the night sky, the Sanish floating upon the water on a summer day, Olehalem was here and gone, the dragon looking back onto the landscape before there was a city named Olehalem. Then the dragon shook Elario free, back into his time and his body.

  “I don’t think it wants to be within me,” he said, his mind attenuated to the flicker as he took cautious steps through the grass.

  “The eye?” Westen queried.

  “The eye is the dragon; the dragon is the eye. It is dead; it is alive, but held hostage in a body it doesn’t know as its own. My body.” It was like explaining his knack to one without a knack. No words described it sufficiently. “The dragon is aware of this world, a little, just as I am aware of its world, a little. We confuse each other. Our minds are too dissimilar to communicate very much.”

  “Does it have anger for you?”

  “No, I don’t feel anger from it, or any ill will. In a way . . . it rejoices. It rejoices to see this world anew. It rejoices to commune with its friends beneath the earth. But it is still bewildered by this second life. Dragons saw pieces of the future, but the dragon within me never saw this future.”

  Elario lost the trail and stopped to regain it. There it was, the sense of kinship drifting to the side and guiding him on.

  Westen looked behind them and his face fell. “Elequa, not now!”

  Two aerials were in the sky, the one that had dropped soldiers on the wall of the pass and another coming in from the west. Both of them were flying for the land between the cliffs of Nevenin and the city of Olehalem.

  “I will come back with you,” Elario said quietly. “If we cannot find them today, we will do it next time.”

  “I will not risk your life here again,” Westen replied. “Seek the bones, Elario! Get me as close as you can to them before we must flee.”

  He sought them. The flicker drew him along to a road that nature was reclaiming, trees breaking apart the pavement and grass swallowing the rubble. The road had once gone past a farm where tubers were grown, and still grew untended. Snarls of yellowed vines and dropped leaves matted the field. A fade of a boy left the fallen home to let chickens out of a nonexistent henhouse, Elario and Westen passing by him unnoticed.

  Nothing. Kin.

  Nothing. Kin.

  Kin.

  The aerial from Nevenin turned. They had been sighted.

  The flicker of kinship from the bones was strengthening. Elario veered off the road to the tuber field, quickening his pace. Instead of having to chase after the dragon bones, now they were pulling him along. Out of the tuber field, through an arena where a fade briefly lunged a horse, past wreckages of homes and barns, his walk grew brisker and brisker and turned into a jog.

  Kin.

  A pistol blasted, Westen shooting a hairless worm of a creature gliding sinuously through the gras
s. The hum of the aerial from the pass became discernible, treetops shaking as it lowered. With his mind attuned to the pull, with the dragon’s eye tossing him about upon the sea, Elario took little but cool notice of these events. He was jogging in the present yet taking to flight simultaneously through the past. From high above, he looked down upon the land where those two heads were journeying. Hills were just beyond them, rippling from north to south in a wavering range between the cities, their highest peak no greater than the hill into Ballevue, and their lowest barely taller than the hillocks in the cove. Past them was a road, old and new in turn.

  Rooftops clustered along the shore of the river, all of them falling down, all of them lifting back up through dragon sight. Inns and taverns, playhouses and boarding houses stood on the water’s edge, as well as a dock for small fishing vessels. Poorer folk lived and worked here, filling carts with freshly caught fish to be driven north to Nevenin proper, or south to Olehalem for sale. For merrymakers with acts too unrefined for the best stages in the Great Cities, there was still good coin to be made in the lesser quarters like this one.

  The road between the river and the hills was too thickly laden with towering trees to make out where three shorter dragontrees resided. It mattered not; he watched himself running over the sloping terrain unerringly. There, it was there, his dragon soaring at his side as he ran like the wind.

  “Get in the bucket and shoot them down!”

  “Yes, Captain!”

  Kin.

  Here. Here it was upon the hill, a hill that looked like any other. His thighs burned as he forced himself up the incline to a flat-top of grass. The pull brought him down to his knees beside a fallen stone plinth. The base remained within the ground, weeds concealing all but two edges of it. Weeds had grown over the plinth too, so that only its point was uncovered.

  He tore at them. “Westen, here! This is exactly where you have to dig!”

  “Leave it, Elario! We must run!” His blue eyes wild with fear and triumph, Westen hauled him upright and away from the bones. Elario had forgotten the aerial, which was engaged in lowering its bucket over the peak of the very next hill. He had also forgotten the second aerial, which was covering ground quickly and nearly to them.