Steampunk Hearts

by Jordan Reece

  Dieter shouted with thrill. “Better than freaks! That’s worth a copper!” He passed one over and Arden at first refused it. But the boy insisted and the copper was duly transferred to the pouch at Arden’s belt. Likewise entertained, Keth gave Arden a nod. They left the tree behind, the sound of the screeching and the smell of shuffle following along for another quarter of a mile.

  It was early evening when they reached the outskirts of Brazia. Master Maraudi guided them through farmland and streets of sagging gray homes to a hill where far grander abodes resided. At the base of the hill were guards, who allowed them to pass but stopped someone in ragged clothes who was pushing a cart full of fine fabrics. “No peddlers!”

  “But I live here!”

  The guards laughed in his face and one said, “Don’t try that with us again. Get back to the Straits where you belong.” The peddler swore at them and rolled his cart away.

  Some of the homes upon the hill were nearly as grand as the palace. Two stories, three stories, one was four rising high into the air and with three cupolas. Exotic plants grew in gardens behind the fences along the street. The carriages traveling up and down it were white and gold, and a proud Halulus drew the finest one of all.

  Their search party appeared shabbier and shabbier as the homes grew more extravagant. The property belonging to Lord Zamin was astonishing even in the growing night. They pulled into the driveway, Master Maraudi speaking to a guard posted there, and Arden looked around at the clipped gardens and splashing fountains. The mansion was enormous, and a light burned in every window. That anyone beneath the king could have so much money amazed him.

  Master Maraudi was displeased. It was almost dark and the tracker wasn’t even in Brazia yet. The guard assured him that the beast was truly on its way. Its behavior was so abhorrent that transferring it slowed everything down. Lord Zamin had relayed to his staff to send his apologies and his promise that the beast would be ready to go in the morning. Neither was he on the property. Business had called him down to town and he was staying the night there in an inn.

  They were taken to the servants’ quarters. Even that was grand, a two-story house with large windows overlooking the mansion and driveway. A pair of rooms had been set aside for them, and a third was rapidly found once the housemother discerned that there was a woman in their company. Dieter and Arden were given a room to share. It had two big beds and an attached washroom.

  “I’ll enjoy this, and so should you, friend,” Dieter said as he settled down under the covers. “If we’re led on a right merry chase around Odri or the wider world than that, we won’t be seeing regular beds for some time.” He was asleep within the minute.

  Arden was not yet tired, so he sat at the window. The moonlight was bright and the sky full of stars, and the sound of the splashing water from the fountains was soothing. The voices in the other rooms softened, as the housemother was knocking on the doors of people who were speaking too loudly, and then Arden was alone in this night as everyone slept. In time, he drifted in the chair, his head to his chest, and awoke at a crack of a shout. “Do not remove his shackles once he’s in the stall! Let him sit there in them all Dagad’s-night!” Another voice answered, swearing loudly. Dieter rolled over in his sleep and mumbled, but did not rouse further. Arden expected the housemother to fly down the hallway with a knock and a thorough scolding, but the voices had come from outside.

  Out the window, servants were rushing around with torches. They were going back and forth to a wagon upon the driveway, lifting away bags and helping down a man as someone cursed at the top of his lungs. There was a cage in the back of the wagon, and a figure was moving around violently within it. The tracker! It could be nothing else but the beast. Someone out of sight was swearing at him. Bars clanged as Arden rubbed his sleep-swollen eyes.

  The swearing and clanging continued. Arden did not like to see animals abused, even those with foul tempers. He had an advantage, of course, and no need to get frustrated. People could be goaded to violence when they could not simply walk into a recalcitrant animal’s mind and make it do what they wanted. Tolaman was one of those people. He had been so rough with the towel on the unicorn’s horn, back when he performed tasks like that, that she wouldn’t come near him even now for any reason. The monkeys hurled shuffle at him, and the pegasus seemed to take a special pleasure in finding a way to step on Tolaman’s foot, or knock him over by suddenly lifting his wings to stretch them.

  Perhaps Arden should offer his help, and he wanted to see this incredible creature that could track down the princess using just a scrap of her clothing. He had only ever heard of specially trained dogs that could perform such a feat, and that was what this beast had to be in part. Slipping on his clothes, he let himself out into the hallway and crept past the bedrooms to the front door. Then he was outside and hurrying to the driveway, the moonlight reflecting in twinkles upon the glittery rocks that lined the garden paths.

  Someone was shouting. “Oh, no, not back here with you shuffle-suckers! Did you miss having your favorite pet to kick around, Yanlou? Webber? Well, here I am! Get your hands out of your pants and line up! And there’s homely little Grelda, making eyes at Dudney and he won’t ever look at her! He’s too busy making eyes at that curvy hot piece in the blue bonnet! And she never looks back at you, does she, Dudney dear, poor fellow? No, she only pants after women. So many love stories in this cursed place that will never get written, so many sad hearts!” Laughter. “Who’s trying to sleep out there?” The laughter became a wordless yell to disrupt it.

  “Shut up, you!” The bars clanged again. The yelling man swore undaunted. It wasn’t the driver, who called to the servants to finish the unloading swiftly so he could get to the barn. Luggage was heaved and footsteps scurried, people going to the barn and the mansion and the servants’ quarters. The swearing and rude comments only increased in volume and depravity as guards hopped into the back of the wagon. One maid passed Arden with a squeak of fright over her packages.

  When he was almost to the driveway, the driver flicked his whip and drove the wagon on to the barn. The door to the mansion closed behind a butler. Two guards remained in the driveway, one with a metal pole. He tapped it on his palm and laughed as Arden appeared from the path. In surprise, the man said, “What brings you out so late, penchant? Was it the yelling? Apologies. He’s a terrible creature.”

  “That was the beast yelling?” Arden asked.

  “Sure, sure, a foul mouth to match his disposition. Don’t you have talking animals where you’re from?”

  Arden nodded. They had a school of mermaids in an exhibit near the squelly pools. It was hard for anyone to understand their speech, since the small degree of human language they had mastered was liberally sprinkled with words from their animal tongue. They showed little propensity to learn more. Visitors to the perindens tried to talk with them, but mermaids were just overlarge fish that shared a resemblance to humans in the upper body. They didn’t concern themselves with small talk or figurative chat; their conversations were devastatingly literal and usually concerned their only interests of fish and grooming. Even their songs were about these matters, raised to the heavens in their lovely, burbling voices. Green fish, blue fish, slow fish, fast fish, chase fish, catch fish, eat fish. Then brush hair.

  Dagad alive, they were dull. Just as dull as dragons in a different way. Mermaids were definitely not capable of swearing with such fluency as that creature in the cage. After seven years of seeing Arden’s face daily, the mermaids still didn’t even know his name, or care to learn it, or they didn’t understand that he had a name. They were fish, after all, and very easy for him to command when necessary because they had so little intelligence.

  Shouting erupted from the barn and he looked over to it in alarm. The guards at his sides were perfectly calm. One said, “No troubles, penchant. He hates to be put in his stall.” A resounding clang echoed through the dark garden. After another bout of yelling, guards and servants exited the barn. One c
losed the door.

  “Would it be all right if I took a look at him?” Arden asked. The guards shrugged and he followed the twinkling paths to the barn. Silence was reigning over the grounds again as everyone went inside or back to their posts around the property.

  Arden opened the door and slipped inside. Overhead lanterns along the corridor cast pools of yellow light on the floor. At the far end of the barn, a groom was brushing down a horse and speaking to her in a friendly singsong. The wagon had been unhitched and rested near the wall, the cage still within it but now empty. There was no sign of the tracker.

  A beast like that would be able to escape a regular horse stall. Arden looked more keenly at the enclosures partially illuminated by the lanterns. The horses were in shadows except for one leaning his head over the top bar. Beyond that one were two enclosures with bars that ran up to the ceiling. Arden walked over and peered in. Within was tack, a large cat sleeping precariously upon a saddle.

  “Help you, sir?” the groom asked.

  Arden hadn’t heard him coming, or the horse he was leading. He turned and the groom’s eyes widened. “You’re that penchant fellow, am I right? Came today to see about the beast.”

  “I would like to take a look at him,” Arden said. “Could you tell me where his stall is?”

  The groom patted the mare’s neck and said, “I got to give her a good feeding and watering, but you can find his cage yourself. Just walk down that way where I was grooming and you’ll see him.”

  “Thank you.”

  “He won’t be happy to see you. He isn’t happy to see anyone, is he? He caused such a fuss and bother today that Arra said no food and water for him tonight. If he can be quiet, he’ll get it tomorrow. Best way to cope with him. He’s a bit of a mess at the moment, but don’t worry. We’ll scrub him up good and proper before we give him to you.” The groom led the mare on to an empty stall. “Come now, good girl. Some pebble in that shoe, huh?” The mare nickered at him.

  Arden retraced his steps past the door and glanced into the stalls on either side. They held horses and ponies and tack. Some were empty and swept clean. He passed the horse he had ridden to Brazia and then his companions’ horses. They were sleeping.

  All of the brushes and combs the groom had been using were tidily put away, but a bucket had gotten left out. Water was murky within it, bits of hay floating on the surface. A sloppy plate of food was beside it, holding a torn-off hunk of bread and cheese, and an apple with a large brown spot on the side.

  Then Arden saw the tracker. Leaning against the bars of an enclosure far too small for him, he was a quiet and miserable sight in torn clothes. His feet were bare and his ankles shackled. A chain ran from the shackles and connected to the ones around his wrists. A lantern dropped its light on him, revealing lips cracked from dehydration, dirty skin and straggling hair, bruises and thinness. His eyes were closed.

  If Arden hadn’t known better, he would have thought it was a human man in there. Unlike the mermaids with their fish tails, nothing about this beast was remotely animal. Cleaned up and put in better clothes, he would have looked like any workingman on the streets that Arden had traveled down all day.

  The water and the plate of food had been left just beyond the creature’s reach to taunt him. Arden knelt down beside the cage for a better look. The ceiling was too low for the tracker to stand, and the bars of the floor were covered in the thinnest blanket of hay.

  The tracker’s eyes opened and he gave Arden an angry look. Hardly believing that this beast had such a good grasp of human tongue, Arden said, “Would you like some water?”

  Silence. Perhaps the animal could only swear. Arden leaned back to the bucket and drew up a brimming ladleful of water. He offered it to the tracker, whose eyes turned from angry to desperate. All of the energy from outside was gone; he was broken down now. Sliding over the bars to the end of the enclosure nearest to Arden, the tracker looked at the water in disgust. His voice came out raspy when he attempted to speak, and he cleared his throat. Still it was raspy when he tried again. “Would you drink out of that? A rusty old barn bucket that sits by a pile of horse clops? Water with hay and dust in it?”

  “No,” Arden said.

  “Then why are you offering it to me?”

  Astounded at this beast, Arden said, “Can you drink from a cup?”

  The tracker held up his hands, which were human-shaped, and displayed them in mockery. “Do you see a reason why I could not?”

  The nearest tack room had only horses’ things. Arden would have to go back to the servants’ quarters or into the mansion to find a cup. The tracker sighed behind the bars. “And you’re another one I’ll have to do the thinking for. No, don’t bother getting a cup. But please, if you’re going to offer me water, pump some straight from the spout into the ladle. That bucket is an offense.” The tracker pointed to the nearby spout. Arden dumped out the dirty water and went to it to refill the ladle. He came back and lowered, a little water sluicing over the side to the hay. The tracker took the ladle from him and drank deeply. “More?” he asked when it was gone.

  Arden gave him a second, and then a third and fourth and fifth. The tracker shook his head after that one, sated at last, and passed back the ladle. Drawing over the plate, Arden flicked a bug from the cheese and offered it. That was wolfed down, followed by the bread. The apple was a wizened, sour thing long past its prime. Chucking it into a stall, Arden found carrots in the tack space. He brought over a handful of the best ones.

  “Careful,” warned the groom, halfway up the ladder to his bed in the loft. “He’ll try to convince you to let him out, or get too close and he’ll grab your neck through the bars and wring it.”

  “Seen and not heard, boy,” said the tracker wearily. “Didn’t your Maw-Maw ever teach you that? Until you have something worth saying, keep your silly thoughts to yourself.”

  Arden wasn’t worried. All he would have to do was override the tracker’s thoughts with his own. Sitting by the enclosure, he watched the beast-man consume the carrots. “If you’re waiting for a grateful lick to the hand,” the man said as he crunched on them, “then pull up some hay, because you’re going to be waiting a long time. If you’re waiting for a grateful lick to some other part of your person, then sorry to disappoint, but I don’t relinquish pleasure to my jailors lightly. Are you a new groom?”

  “How have you come by such a command of language?” Arden asked, bypassing the question to one that interested him far more.

  “How does anyone? How did you?”

  “My mother.”

  “Well, it might surprise you, but you’re not the only one in the world with a mother. I didn’t hatch from an egg.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “Yes. Do you?”

  “Arden.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-two,” the tracker said. “If you don’t want a lick, are you waiting around for tricks? Should I stand on my head for you? Perform feats of mathematical prowess? Two and two is four. Ten less seven is three. If you get kicked fifteen times and I get kicked sixteen times, how fast will a boat travel down the River Shayle? You think that one is nonsense, but there actually is a sensible answer to it. But maybe you want a discussion of history or Loria-Odri border agreements. Can’t help you there. I’m limited to Cascades mountain matters, by and large. Know where those are? Past the High Reaches in the far northwest? We have little to do with downland folk and downland problems, and your damned Dagad has given you plenty of both. We don’t worship your Dagad. There’s no sense in giving thanks to someone who gives you nothing but troubles.”

  The tracker breathed deeply and made a face. “You reek. Maybe the trick you want is a lesson on how to wash your arse after you push out a messy shuffle. It’s a complicated maneuver, I’ll give you that.” He yawned. “Later. Buck up, Arden, you’ll get it one day.”

  “He’ll go on and on at you,” called the groom
sleepily from above. “Telling stupid stories. Jokes with no answer. Singing. Screaming in the dead of night to wake me up.”

  The tracker didn’t look like he was going to scream. He looked beaten and fatigued. His hands lay over his stomach protectively like the food and water inside might disappear.

  This was the creature due to be installed in the perindens after the princess was returned to the palace, and this was going to be a problem. People brought their young children to marvel at the beasts. They were not going to find a shrieking, swearing wild man marvelous. Unless Arden was to be stationed in the exhibit all through visiting hours, he wouldn’t be able to control what this beast said. Tolaman couldn’t spare him for so much time. The tracker’s food could be drugged to keep him placid and amenable to floods of staring faces, but that didn’t solve the problem of there being nothing very interesting about him except an ability that couldn’t be demonstrated in an enclosure. And the fact that he could talk . . . the abdication of the runaway princess was to be kept a secret, and he was perfectly capable of braying it at the top of his lungs!

  Some of these problems were for later, but it was imperative that Arden speak to Master Maraudi tonight. The tracker had to be kept in the dark about the identity of the person he was to hunt, and they could not speak of it where he could overhear. Dear Dagad, he could sing it out from the bars of his cage behind Keth’s horse, and then it would be all over Odri in a day. They had to pretend to be chasing down someone else, someone who would spur no interest from passerby should the tracker yell about it.

  And in the perindens . . . if he could not be controlled by Arden’s constant presence in the exhibit, if Arden’s skill wore out from overuse as it would with a highly intelligent creature, Tolaman would beat the tracker into submission. Yet those methods had clearly already been used on him, and it hadn’t served to dull his voice.