Steampunk Tales, Volume 1

by Ren Cummins

  He groaned audibly. He was never going to leave this cesspool.

  “You okay, there, Marcus?” His newest partner, Jondal, still couldn’t pronounce his name right. Or maybe it was just his accent. Either way, it wasn’t quite yet to the point where Marcos felt hard-pressed to correct him. Although, he realized, if he didn’t do it soon, it was never going to happen. If, Marcos was forced to concede, Jondal remained his partner for very long.

  “Um, huh?” He shook his head, in a lackluster attempt to clear the stubborn languor from his thoughts. “Yeah, I’m fine, just having trouble waking up today,” he lied.

  This was not the way he’d hoped his career would go. He was thirty years old, he had a wife and the required three children back home – two of which were actually theirs, which was an honor afforded only the more successful and promising young members in the Queen’s army. He hadn’t even seen his wife since he was sent on assignment – due to the necessary degree of secrecy inherent to such a task, they were forced to rely solely upon the secure communications between themselves and their central base of communications, and aside from the small bits of approved correspondence between family members, he’d been essentially alone out here.

  Well, he had his steady stream of rotating partners, he admitted, though it wasn’t the same thing. His first partner had been here for twenty years, due to a series of apparent clerical errors – and Marcos was determined not to let that happen to him, too. No, he had decided, Jondal was going to be his last partner here in this wart on the ass of their fair city. One last partner to train, Marcos swore to himself, and he would be free to return to his home on the inside of that astoundingly high wall.

  Unless, he thought, they were able to complete their assignment. It was an impossible task – a grain of sand on the sea floor – to find some girl that the Queen required: a girl with white hair and purple gems on her skin. His predecessor hadn’t even been privy to THAT much information for much of his time out here – they’d only been told to keep their eyes open for a young person of undetermined age, with ‘unique abilities’, whatever that meant. But right after he’d been transferred here, they received new information along with his senior partner’s transfer orders. The new instructions more specifically described their target, along with her name: Rom. Strange names, these castoffs made for themselves. But what did one expect from the unclean?

  He took a deep breath, and realized he wasn’t gagging anymore at the smell like he once had. Even Jondal seemed in good spirits. Too good of spirits, Marcos thought. But that would change, soon enough. Just so long as they transferred Marcos out before the poor sap collapsed into a bitter awareness of the horrible depths of madness this place could engender.

  In order to help them maintain a cover, they pretended to be from the far side of this “Oldtown” – due to their essentially agrarian culture, few of the thirty thousand or so people who lived here ever travelled far from their homes. Transportation was effectively limited, due to their lack of time or resources. They’d fashioned a rough farce of a city out of the clay and garbage they’d scrounged, likely, from a large portion of the ancient machines that still littered the fields. Their cover included running a small resale shop, where they took in all sorts of items and cleaned them up to be traded or sold for other goods. It was the sort of occupation which required very little of their actual time, gave them an opportunity to interact with many of the people here, and created an illusory source of income which could be secretly sustained by actual converted funds or materials from their connections back at headquarters.

  Jondal busied himself with cleaning up an old pair of boots. It was menial labor by any stretch of the imagination – all part of the illusion – but Jondal, unlike him, actually seemed to enjoy it. Marcos wondered if he’d been like that, a year ago. It had certainly seemed like an adventure – exploring the ruins of centuries-old civilizations, hiding in plain sight among the descendents of the exiled criminals and rebels elements of their perfect and flawless society; blessed by the Queen Herself, her Highness of the Tranquil Sphere (well, okay, one of her Priests) to spend a short season beyond the sanctified embrace of the protective Great Wall; really, not a terrible sacrifice in the big scope of the world. Compared to his cousin Tarrel, who spent two years scraping the muck from the sewage pits, this was still a dramatically more enviable mission.

  His thoughts of sewage and ramming his partner’s idiotic smile into the workshop table were interrupted by their first customer of the day.

  “Ah, good morning, Kari!” he said. His smile was genuine - - Kari was an enthusiastic and cheerful young apprentice at the college – and who reminded him a lot of his own children, albeit a few years older than they would be now. But also, Kari was something of a prodigy - - even in this relative wasteland of technology, she was beginning to access degrees of skill and understanding that challenged him. She’d only started at the college four months earlier, but she was obviously being given access to levels of technology on the cutting edge of what these farmers generally had access to.

  She swung her shoulder pack onto the main counter, and dumped out a large pile of old wiring and parts. Slipping the strap for the pack back over her head, she scattered the parts gently apart.

  Marcos laughed. “You’ve been out in the fields again, I see,” he noted, picking through some of the circuits and bits she’d obviously scrounged. “The wilds are dangerous, girl – what would your professors say if they caught you out there? Or worse, you could get hurt!”

  She shrugged. “I never go alone,” she said dismissively. “And, besides, how else am I going to learn about the old machines if I don’t take a closer look at them?”

  “Just so you’re not going at night,” he said. “Just because the creatures don’t come into the city at night very much anymore doesn’t mean it’s safe out there.”

  Nodding, she turned the subject back to her finds. “I tried to get some better things this time,” she said. “I can’t even tell what a lot of this does.”

  He was mentally cataloguing the items as he went along. They’d not really mastered circuitry outside the Wall, as their primary source of energy – steam – tended to corrode and short out the more refined electrical systems. Even so, it was clear to Marcos that Kari had indeed deeply excavated for these bits – time had been relatively kind to these parts.

  “These are in good shape,” he said appreciatively. “Where’d you find them?”

  Kari grinned. “Like I’d tell you,” she laughed. “A good scavenger doesn’t give away their secrets.”

  “Fair enough,” he smiled.

  Jondal walked over and peered over Marcos’ shoulder. “Wow, those are ol-“

  Marcos cut him off, masking a gentle elbow to Jondal’s stomach as an accidental – and friendly – bump. “Oh, sorry, about that, Jondal - - were you saying that these were incredibly unusual and archaic pieces of science that we don’t entirely understand?”

  “Er, yes,” Jondal admitted, rubbing his stomach. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I was gonna say. Fascinating and mysterious.” He wandered back to his table, trying unsuccessfully to appear disinterested in their conversation.

  “Yeah…” Kari said. Marcos and the co-owner of his shop might be strange, but she always brought him what she found out in the fields, deep in the bellies of the old machines. She took some of her findings into her workroom in the Steam Labs, but brought things like this – old technology that she couldn’t effectively work with – here. He seemed to enjoy the old bits of discarded tech, and he usually had good things in his shop to trade. “Anyway,” she continued, picking up one particular piece, “I keep seeing this kind of thing in some of the equipment. It looks like a piece is missing, here. You see?”

  Marcos saw precisely what she meant, but managed to pretend as if he didn’t. He deliberately pointed to the wrong area of the part and furrowed his brow. “This?”

  She grabbed his hand and moved it to a rounded space i
n the center of a large mangled segment of cables. “No, right there. It’s like there should be a roundish thing right here – with the two clamps on the top and bottom to hold it in place.” She sighed, letting go of his hand and moving some of the other parts around. “I’ve found ten or more parts like this, all with that same thing missing. I think it’s something important. But nobody seems to know what would fit in there.”

  He picked up the part, turning it over in his hands. “Looks like an important piece. Do you know what it’s for?”

  Kari shrugged. “I’m not sure. I think it’s the power source. See, all those metal lines come out of here, and from there they go to the different parts of the whole system. I think it carries energy from there, but I don’t know what could create energy and fit into that small of a space.”

  Jondal smiled. “A battery?”

  “A what?”

  The look Marcos fixed upon his partner was positively venomous, causing Jondal to blanch, stammering out a hasty “oh, er, nothing. Never mind,” he concluded, quoting as he had been instructed: “Fascinating and mysterious.”

  Marcos was smiling congenially when Kari, confused, turned back to him.

  “You’d know better than I would,” he told her, carefully avoiding her eyes. “But these are some really interesting things – I’ve got an artist friend over in the Cordrin sector who would love these.” He cleared an area and laid out his ledger, and flipped over to a page they’d set aside just for Kari’s account. She waited impatiently but with an impeccably casual air about her, determined to not let him see her excitement. She’d been doing business here for the past four months – just after she’d started in the College – and knew about what he’d value these parts for, and had already done the math in her head before coming in today.

  He went through the motions, though, just as keenly aware of what the balance would eventually come to, but he enjoyed the game of making her anxious for him to arrive at the total. At last – just before Kari thought she might burst – he laid his pencil down and looked up at her. “I can offer you 175 credit-steels for this. That will bring your total to 40,013.”

  Kari jumped and let out a scream as soon as he’d said the words “forty thousand”.

  Marcos closed the ledger, tilting his head to one side. “Was there something you had in mind -” he began to say, but Kari had already run around him and into their back office.

  “Mine!” she yelled, running back out with a large brown metal box. She sat the box on the counter, flipped the latch and opened the lid. She expanded the interior sections and counted every last one of the dozens of small tools separated out inside the container.

  “Ah, the lady does have a discerning eye,” Marcos said. “Please give me a moment while I see what price we have for this antique toolset - - - - hmmm….” He flipped back open the ledger and slowly turned the pages while Kari ignored him and continued to examine the tools.

  “Ah, yes, here it is. ‘Antique Tool Box’, established price… fifty thousand”

  “WHAT?” Kari yelled. “You said Forty!”

  “Forty? That can’t be right, this toolbox is in…” He held to the joke as long as he dared, but finally cracked a smile. “Why, right you are, my young steamsmith, this five is in fact a four. Forty thousand it is.”

  She scowled at him, slamming the lid – carefully – shut, and nodded to Marcos and Jondal, hefted the box and turned to go. “I have to go, I’m late! Thank you!”

  Jondal held the door open for her and the two covert agents for the Queen watched the girl walk off at a brisk pace.

  “You’re sure she’s not the one we’re looking for, Marcus?”

  Marcos winced but again said nothing about the flawed pronunciation. “No, we’re not looking for a scientist - - sure, Kari’s probably generations ahead of these other slaggers here, but she’s not the one the Queen’s got her eye out for. The one we want can DO things, not just build things.”

  He frowned. He missed his family. He might not hate his job, but he really didn’t like it. Though, sometimes, it wasn’t so bad.

  * * * * *

  “I still don’t see anything.”

  “Try again, Cousins,” Briseida said patiently, gesturing for him to pick the small assortment of stones back up and place them in the leather pouch. “Your form is good, but you’re still thinking too hard about it all.”

  He growled under his breath. “So how do I make myself not think about not thinking?”

  She held his hand over the bag of stones and looked into his eyes. “Thinking means sending your mind into the past, or to the future or to somewhere else in the present. Not thinking means keeping your mind right here, in this moment. It is simply you the stones.”

  Lifting her hand again, she nodded, softly. “You,” she repeated, “and the stones.”

  Shaking his head disparagingly, he sat motionless for several breaths, as she had taught him to do. It wasn’t the showy alternative displays he had initially expected; but Briseida had worked with him personally, working quickly through the various sciences and arts involved in divination. At first, she kept to a very general overview of them all, until they began to focus on finding his own innately sensitive variant of the combined arts. Of them all, he had seemed the most in tune with geomancy; so they shifted their more specialized training in the casting and reading of runes. But there was, as Cousins almost instantly discovered, a difference between learning the technical practice of a thing, and learning to make it your own.

  She put her hand on his again. “No, Cousins. Bring your mind back to this moment.” How did she do that? he wondered. He cleared his throat, kept his eyes closed and took a long, slow breath through his nose. Just me…and the stones, he thought, Just me…and the stones.

  He absently noticed that he had somehow turned the bag upside down, spilling the stones out across a small area of the floor in front of him. When he opened his eyes, Briseida was smiling at him.

  “Well done, Cousins,” she said. “Very well done.”

  He wasn’t entirely certain what she could possibly have meant by that, until his eyes dropped to the divergence of stones. At first, they seemed as random as the rest, but then his eyes looked past the individual stones – merely to catalog their respective meanings – and began to draw the connections between them.

  “Tell me what it means,” she said. “Only you will know the truth of them.”

  He pointed at two of the stones, starting at the top of the clock-face. “These are the Pilgrim stones, they seek truth.” At another stone which had rolled past them, he added, “and this is Serendipity. It brings the Pilgrims good luck as well as bad luck.”

  Three other stones had landed near one another. Of these he explained, “Two of these are Lost, one of these is Forgotten, but all three are trapped. This one,” he added, pointing to the Emperor stone, which was inverted and upside-down, “is the Empress – I think maybe this is supposed to represent the Queen – but upside down, she is powerless.”

  His brow furrowed again. Some of it seemed to make sense, but it was all fragments. It was missing some sort of connective thread that tied them all together.

  “This stone is a warrior – no, wait. It’s a soldier. But I think it’s a dead soldier? Anyway, it’s fallen or falling, I can’t tell if it’s present or past or future.” He pointed at another rock which had settled on top of the soldier. “This one is the Wish stone, but the way it’s sitting… it feels more like…” He struggled for the word.

  “Greed?” Briseida asked.

  He snapped his fingers. “Yes! The askew form of the Wish stone is Greed,” he reminded himself. “So Greed will kill the Soldier.” The brief flash of pleasure at successfully making the connections instantly began to fade at the realization of the meaning behind those connections. His expression drooped as he thought for a moment of all the details he had thus far defined. “This isn’t turning into a very optimistic reading,” he said.

  Brisei
da smiled. “You aren’t done yet - - many happy endings are only achieved after difficult trials,” she explained patiently.

  He shrugged noncommittally. “I suppose we’ll see.” He looked at the last grouping of stones. This set was the most perplexing yet. He read them off out loud, hoping to glean some sense of them by hearing them spoken. “The Sword, the Shield, and the Angel…well, I think that’s the Angel. It’s kind of sideways, so what does that mean?”

  She looked more closely at the stone in question. “It actually refers to an ancient word meaning Messenger, or Light from Heaven. Upright, it often means Angel, but usually refers to someone who is helpful or provides you with an important truth or wisdom. Inverted, it would mean the opposite, and upside down it would mean the absence of those.”

  “So the sword and shield are both upright and face-up. So they are a force for attack and defense, plus…understanding?” He wrestled with these, but couldn’t see how they tied into the rest. At last, Briseida patted his hand.

  “You should write these down in your journal,” she said, pointing towards a large book of blank paper on the nearby table. “Many impressions make more sense the closer we get to the events which inspired them.”

  He remained on the floor for several minutes more before standing and writing down the stones and their arrangement. Something about the stones felt significant. Briseida smiled, satisfied that he seemed to finally be acquiring a certain sense for divining. Noticing the time, she excused herself so she could attend to the afternoon meal, and brought their morning lesson to a close.