Steampunk Tales, Volume 1

by Ren Cummins

  The blue sparks again erupted, but this time began to spread across the surface of the creature. All its arms and appendages began to twitch violently, and it screamed again.

  “I think we better stand back,” Mulligan suggested, and Rom agreed, taking another hop backwards from the monster. It was convulsing now, its tail whipping about and still oozing from the wound she had previously given it.

  She was only distantly aware that Ian was now standing beside her. “It fights against death,” he said. “Something – some reason, or something more – bonds it to this world. You must sever that.”

  Rom was about to ask how she might accomplish that, when she felt the staff shift one final time. The handle twisted, become longer, and the top felt heavier. She knew the long, curved blade was affixed to the top of the staff even before she looked at it. They’d talked about this tool in the agriculture classes in the orphanage – it was called a scythe. It was used for harvesting. She nodded silently. She knew what to do, but in spite of this knowledge, a coldness crept up beneath her skin. The scythe felt different than the other forms her Crook possessed; there was a permeable sentience to it – it felt alive.

  She stood in renewed silence, waiting for the creature’s movements to slow. At last, it simply shuddered on the stones of the street.

  “Careful,” Mully urged.

  Nodding, she stepped closer, towards the shivering head of the long millipede. As she raised the blade back in a fearful arc behind her, the creature paused, tilting its head towards her. In the sodium yellow lights of the street, she could see herself reflected from the many onyx beads of its eyes. There she was, an eleven year old girl in a charcoal dress and a pet flying (and speaking) cat. A fearsome yet empathetic figure of death itself: a harvester, a reaper. A Sheharid Is’iin. A merciful agent of the world of the spirits.

  In her heart, she heard the creature concede: it was time to die. The air whistled past the blade as it passed through the head of the beast without a visible trace. One more twitch, and that was all. It was gone, leaving only its body behind. In her mind, she heard its gratitude.

  The scythe remained for a long moment as if breathing the air, before shifting back to the original form of the shepherd’s crook. She stared at it for the space of several breaths, at last dismissing it with a gentle press of the bracelet’s stone.

  Ian stepped from the shadows to stand beside her, and led her back to a nearby rooftop.

  “Ian?” she asked. “Was this what it was like for you?”

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  She was silent for another while, but then said, “The others I met – Memory, Force and Inertia – they could all do things based on their names. Or their names were based on what they could do, they never really explained that.”

  Ian smiled kindly. “It is a little of both, in fact,” he said.

  She turned to face him. “What about you? ‘Ian’ isn’t really a Sheharid name, then, is it?”

  He breathed out slowly through his nose. “It is the name I took when my gem was stripped from me. Before then, I was known as Passion.”

  Rom’s face wrinkled. “Passion? Sounds like a pretty dumb power.”

  He laughed. “It did have its uses. But mostly, it was very helpful in understanding people, or helping to control people’s fears or anger.”

  “Is it all gone, then?” Rom asked. “All the powers you had as a Sheharid?”

  Nodding slowly, he answered. “The power went with the gem.”

  She paused a moment, then quickly stepped closer and hugged him, briefly. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He patted her hair. “Do not be,” he said. “Had it not happened this way, I might never have had the pleasure of meeting you.”

  She let go, stepping back and biting the inside of her cheek to keep herself from letting her emotions escape her. It wasn’t enough, all the responsibility she was beginning to feel, to then add a large share of guilt for events she’d had no power to stop.

  To Ian, she said simply, “Are we done learning?”

  “For tonight,” he replied.

  That was a good enough answer for her. She looked back at him, noted the somber expression on his face, and nodded. With a slight movement of her foot, she leapt the thirty-plus feet to the next rooftop and began the short journey back to the apothecary.

  Chapter 16: Never Use a Strange Pistol

  Kari couldn’t fall asleep. She’d reluctantly gone upstairs with Goya’s reassurances that Rom would be in good hands with that tall stranger, but she felt uneasy about him. She recognized him from the other night when he’d helped Briseida tend to Rom’s injuries and carried her all the way back to the Orphanage, but it was strange that she hadn’t remembered that she remembered until just then at dinner. Something about him was vibrantly magical, she could barely hear anything but the music when he was around. She had asked Goya about the music she could hear after Rom and Ian had left.

  “Where is that music coming from?” she’d asked.

  Briseida and Goya exchanged knowing looks. Goya explained, “What you are hearing, Kari, is not actual music. It is the language of magic, spoken only to those who are either extensively trained in hearing it, or those rare few who have the natural ear to perceive it.”

  Kari looked over at Cousins. “That box you had – something inside it was singing like that, too,” she said. All eyes at the table focused on the young man – an experience of which he was less than fond.

  Cousins sighed, running a nervous hand through his light straw-colored hair. “Okay, yes. I probably shouldn’t have involved you girls. But there were unfortunate circumstances.”

  Briseida spoke up in his defense. “Kari, it was a favor I asked of him. What he carried had significant value, and we needed to be certain it was not acquired by undesirable parties.”

  “What was it?”

  Briseida stood and walked into the other room. A few moments later, Kari could hear the sound again – faintly, but growing in volume. When Briseida returned, she was carrying the small box. She opened it and placed a small leather pouch on the table in front of Kari.

  “Go ahead – you may open it.”

  Kari loosed the drawstring and emptied the contents carefully into her hand – a single rock, smaller than the palm of her hand. It was a deep yellow in color, nearly opaque, with a series of random lines crossing the interior that made it appear cracked and broken. For a moment, it simply looked like a smoothly polished, egg-shaped stone. But after resting in her palm, it began to glow brightly, the volume increasing dramatically as well. She winced, startled, and dropped the stone onto the table. There, the glowing dimmed and the music resumed its previous tone.

  Cousins was staring. “Okay, that, even I heard for a moment,” he said, breathless with wonder.

  Goya nodded. “You have indeed a rare gift, child. Rarely does a Morrow Stone react so strongly with someone untrained.”

  Kari stared back down at the rock. It didn’t look significant, really. Smooth and shiny, perhaps, but it didn’t seem particularly wondrous. “A what stone?”

  “A Morrow Stone is a rare object – a storage fount of art,” Briseida explained. “Legends used to speak of these as being items of unimaginable power – magicians of old were said to use them to store their artistry, their energies. It has been suggested that some have even pressed their very souls into them, giving other magicians the opportunity to draw on that magical essence.”

  Goya took a drink from her glass and set it back down. “They were patterned after the spirit gems of the Sheharid Is’iin,” she said. “But where those gems were a natural extension of their arts, the Morrow stones were a constructed fusion of magical energies into stone. But the process of their construction has been lost to time – no new Morrow stones have been made in more than a hundred years.”

  Kari continued to examine the stone, turning it over slowly in her hands, staring intently at every line, texture and color within the stone. It was
certainly different than anything else she’d ever seen – and the pattern of the music she could distinctly hear emanating somehow from within it started to make sense to her. She realized she knew the notes enough that she found herself starting to hum along with it, but at that point, Briseida held her hand out for the stone. Reluctantly, Kari gave it back to her and felt a strange sadness as the music faded while Briseida put the stone away.

  The topic changed to other things – some of the day to day happenings in the shop, and so forth, when Kari caught herself yawning. Goya herself mentioned being rather tired, and they all made their way off to their rooms for the night. Briseida was the last to go upstairs, first making the rounds to the doors and windows and securing the building for the evening.

  The song wouldn’t leave Kari’s mind, however. She lay in bed and could hear it playing, over and over. When she had first heard the music, it had seemed more like a series of wordless tones, but the more she listened to it in her mind, she noticed that there were actually words and structure to it. Embedded in the pattern of the notes, there were distinct verbal tones and sounds – she couldn’t figure out what kind of language it was, but she couldn’t help thinking that she could come to understand it if she could simply break it down enough.

  Her thoughts fluttered, wavered - - something distracted the threads of the music’s puzzle that was attempting to unravel in her mind. It was soft, but close – her eyes snapped open when it occurred to her that it was another series of notes. Someone else was using some sort of magic nearby! Her first thought was that it was likely Goya or Briseida, but something about the tone in the music felt unusual, somehow different than what she would expect either of the women to use. There was an accent to it, a different voice generating the notes. Also, the music felt hushed, like someone was trying to sing and not be heard.

  Uncertain of exactly why she was worried, she got out of bed quietly and crept to her door. She listened there, but heard nothing but the faint strains of the same music. This music, she could now tell, was very distinct from the Morrow Stone’s melodies – in fact, she could almost immediately pick apart the pattern and structure of this. There was an almost masculine energy about this; it was most certainly not either of the two older women who lived here. And it wasn’t Cousins – she generally felt no sense of art about him at all, it couldn’t be anything he was creating. Her eyes widened. An intruder!

  She listened again at the door, trying to see if she could understand where it was coming from – it seemed relatively close, but then again, not too near - - deciding it was probably downstairs, she slowly opened the door to her room, careful not to allow the door catch to snap open or closed as she did so.

  She and Rom had learned long ago how to walk on wooden floors without letting them creak; she kept to the wall, where the support was more stable and less likely to allow for temperature or moisture expansion of the planks. Slowly, she made her way down the hall towards Cousin’s room, even as she continued to listen to the magical tones and tried to understand its nature. It was a spell of some sort, she could tell; but what was its purpose? What was the magic effect being attempted? What were they doing? Who were they?

  Nearly halfway to Cousin’s door, she realized that the pattern of the art was too structured, too flawlessly stable to be done by a person – it had to be some sort of active device. She wasn’t sure why she knew that, but it made sense, somehow. She frowned. What if that device could be activated and allowed to repeat its spell without the caster being nearby? Not a good thought, she realized. If that was the case, the intruder could be anywhere. They could even be up here on the same floor as she was.

  A momentary rise of panic flooded through her, breaking her concentration – the sound of the magic faded, replaced by a far too loud creak of a board beneath her foot. She froze in her steps, too late.

  Movement appeared from the shadows ahead of her, between her and Cousin’s door. A woman turned to face her, a white mask pulled snugly across her face to just above her lips. From neck to toe, she was dressed in a black suit, buckled down one side. Across her shoulder was slung a small pack, with a holster strapped to her opposite hip and tied across at the middle of her leg. Both hands were gloved, with the fingertips exposed. Above the mask were a pair of goggles, and a long ponytail was visible behind her left ear.

  The woman raised one index finger to her lips and pointed back towards Kari’s room with the other. But if she thought Kari too afraid to respond, she was mistaken.

  “HELP!” Kari screamed.

  “Damn it,” the woman hissed. The gun at her side was immediately in her hand – she spat out one word: “Sleep!” as she pulled the trigger.

  Cousins threw open the door just in time to see Kari collapse, a strange woman pointing a gun towards her. Without a second thought, he charged her from behind, driving his shoulder into her arm and sending the gun flying from her hand. They both collapsed onto the floor but Cousins was the first back onto his feet, scrambling for the gun. He’d seen this gun before, they called it a “Spellshot” – instead of the iron or wooden balls most such pressure-employed firearms employed, this one had a cartridge of single-use magical shells, which were either permanently charged or relied on a short-term command from their wielder.

  Life on the streets had taught him to work the odds. Picking up the gun, he drew it aligned on the masked woman and called out “stun!” as he pulled the trigger. A red flare of light burst from the barrel, knocking him backwards towards the wall. He gritted his teeth in fury as an invisible force paralyzed him and caused him to drop to the floor.

  The woman’s lips curled in a grin. “Silly boy,” she purred. “Don’t you know never to pick up a stranger’s gun?”

  She bent over and pried the pistol out of his sluggish hand. “Mine’s got a devastating safety feature,” she whispered. “Just be glad you weren’t shooting to kill.”

  She holstered the gun and looked him over. “You don’t have it on you, do you? Hmmm. But Favo says you had it when you got here, so you must have given it to them.” She frowned, taking a cursory look back around the second floor landing.

  “Not even any shields up here, so it must be back downstairs.” She looked back to Cousins. “Don’t go anywhere,” she said. “We’ll be back to talk to you if we can’t find it.”

  Chapter 17: Favo Carr

  Favo. There was no need to specify a last name to him; there was only one man named Favo of any note in the town; Favo Carr. Cousins was a well known name on the streets, but among most circles he was just considered “a kid who knows a guy”, the sort of young person people sought out for the random errand; for the casual introduction. He had a reputation for following through, keeping trust, and honesty. At the least, he never gave away anyone’s secrets, and, in his line of work, confidentiality had a serious amount of value.

  Favo Carr had a different reputation. He was a bit more than ten years Cousins’ senior, and had made a strong name for himself early on in his career as a petty thief. He was arrested by the Defense Guild, but being only 14 years of age, had his sentence commuted in exchange for an apprenticeship by a professor of the school of Kinesthesiology; the judges supposed that a year or two under the tutelage of an institute of science might give Favo the discipline he obviously lacked. What they did not know was that Favo’s new guardian, Mason Boggard, had a series of debts owed to certain unsavory elements of their city, and needed a means of acquiring money and goods in a way the college and his peers could not discern.

  Boggard taught Favo not necessarily the standard courses in magic, but rather taught him an applied series of lessons and loaned him a variety of artifacts which allowed Favo to bring in a substantial quantity of wealth. However, Boggard was not satisfied with simply paying his debts – he continued to utilize Favo to make him substantially well off, meanwhile affording the young man an education in crime and subterfuge.

  What Boggard did not foresee was that his own greed would imprint its
elf on Favo, as well – and eventually Boggard’s crimes were anonymously revealed to his collegiate board of magistrates, who divested him of his position and title, delivering his substantial assets to his only heir – his ward, Favo. A few years later, Boggard himself was found dead in an alleyway, a casualty of his own unpaid debts to others of Oldtown’s dark underworld.

  Favo, having made many contacts across the town itself, left the college but thrived as an independent entrepreneur – he opened a series of private investment houses, which were in fact little more than a front for his operations. People who were privy to such things knew that if there was something that had to be done, acquired, or removed, no matter the cost, Favo could get it done. Even the defense guild had sought his services on occasion – there were things even they were uncomfortable doing. Favo, as such, became at the young age of a mere 25, one of the most notorious and acceptably ruthless names of Oldtown-Against-the-Wall.

  Cousins had been trying to avoid Favo ever since he’d been tasked with delivering the box to Goya – he and his second-in-command, Molla – had almost caught up with him a week ago, when he’d had the good fortune to cross paths with Kari and Rom. He’d left the box with them long enough to be able to convince Favo he didn’t have it as well as sincerely convince him that he didn’t know where it was. It wasn’t that Cousins had a problem with lying, it was just that he knew Favo well enough to know he tended to use magic in his work. The simplest way to beat a Veracity spell was to tell the truth – the key was to arrange the facts so that you could literally tell the truth, but conceal what you did not want to be caught with.

  Evidently, Favo had decided to keep tabs on Cousins anyway. He wanted to kick himself – he should’ve understood the Looking Glasses’ meaning when they told him to stay. Clearly, Favo must have been waiting for him to leave.