Steampunk Tales, Volume 1

by Ren Cummins

  She arched her back and nodded back to Rom before dashing off down the hall. Extending the small claws on her toes for traction, she ran up the curve of the tunnel until she was running upside down, suspended by the pipes and cables which ran along the ceiling. She dropped down another thirty meters later, on the opposite side of the creature they were tracking. Spooked, it began running directly in Rom’s direction.

  She positioned her feet shoulder’s width apart, holding her staff comfortably in her hands.

  The creature jumped to her right, bounding from there sharply to her left before she had a chance to trap it. But she swung the base curved end of the staff up and over, managing to startle it back into rethinking its course of escape.

  It leaped back to pause only two or three meters in front of her, giving her a good look at the creature responsible for so much trouble. It was very low-set to the ground, with large eyes and larger ears, covered in short fur and thick stripes. The greenish light cast a gleam across rows of gleaming tiny teeth as it yawned wide to hiss at her. In spite of it all, Rom thought he was adorable.

  Terenaa lunged at him from behind, causing him to spin about, hiss again, and vanish completely.

  Rom and her summoned friend were too stunned to speak. But Rom instinctively reached out in her mind to locate him – and realized he hadn’t gone anywhere at all – though was moving slowly to one side, careful to step only on the dry bits of ground.

  She moved the tube into her right hand so that it held both the tube and her staff, while she reached into one of the inner pockets of her uniform. At the end of a small silver chain connected to her undershirt and secured in a small leather pouch was a pocket watch. It had been given her by an old mystic from Oldtown and did not tell time so much as… controlled it.

  Rom pressed the small clasp button on the watch, and felt time slow down, past a crawl, all the way to silence and motionlessness. All around her, the air felt thick, compressed upon her like thick, warm, water. She pushed herself forward a step, feeling it rush past her, drawing her tunic and hair tightly back, resisting her motions. It reminded her, as it always did, of the great white waves in the sea, crashing down upon the cliffs at the base of the city.

  Taking the light tube back in her left hand, she lowered the large curving end of her staff out to tap the creature in the side. Sure enough, he was right there where she could feel him, but he somehow was able to make himself translucent in the darkness. As she stepped around him, she could still see a distorted outline of him, frozen in space.

  She grinned. “Oh, I hope you’re friendly,” she whispered, “you’re brilliant.”

  Reaching the top of the staff out further, she touched him gently at the crown of his head.

  Instantly, she could see into his mind, clarifying it from the maelstrom of thoughts which had resided there moments before into a translation of concerns and ideas.

  “Ahh! How did you see me!?” it screamed into her mind.

  “Shhhh,” she whispered back. “You’re going to be okay, I’m just here to keep you from biting people.”

  “Not my fault, he almost stepped on me! Big thing like that, needs to watch where he’s going!”

  “I’ll be sure to tell him so,” she whispered back with a smile. She pushed a half step more forward, against the rush of resisting air. “But there’s something else wrong with you, correct?”

  Images flashed past her mind, elusive to the creature’s ability to translate. “One of you did this. More than one. Many. Pointy cold and fiery burn! Well before, not well now.”

  “Maybe I can help you. I’ve helped her, too,” she added, sending him an image of Terenaa. “She was sick, and asked me to help her be better. And now she helps me, too.”

  The little creature seemed to consider this for a moment. “What if I disagree?” He was certainly becoming comfortable with the concept of language, Rom realized.

  “I hope you won’t,” Rom said. “Because I will either need to stop you now, or you will be killed when the big water comes through here tonight.”

  He shivered. “It hurts,” he said. “Can it not hurt?”

  Rom whispered back. “I can make it not hurt. And if you want to stay and help me, you can. Or if you just want to leave this place forever, I can help you do that, too.”

  “Forever?”

  Nodding, Rom sent him an image of the world of spirit.

  He reached into the image, tasting it, feeling it, seeing every bit of it.

  At last, he sent back to her mind: “Not enough shadows. Rickets likes the shadows, too.”

  “Rickets?” Rom asked.

  “Rickets am I,” he whispered back.

  Rom’s eyes flashed. “You talk?”

  In her mind, the creature blinked. “Rickets didn’t before.”

  She lowered the staff end to just above his motionless head. “Then, do you agree?”

  He whispered back. “Yes. Rickets wants to stay.”

  She tapped his head with the staff, and felt a soft rush of his soul travel up the length of it before coming to rest within one of her two gems.

  Although nothing still had moved around her, the small body of Rickets looked lessened, reduced. She paused another moment to mourn him before reaching into her pocket and rejoining time with an additional press of the watch’s button.

  Once time continued, Terenaa took a look at the now-visible body lying still on the upward slope of the circular tunnel and flicked her whiskers in an indication of her disdain. “Did it put up much of a fight? The little ones always do.”

  Rom shook her head, tapping one of the gems with the light tube. “He’s decided to work with us,” she said.

  Terenaa mulled this over before appearing to agree. “It would be nice to have someone else running through the muck. I know I don’t stay dirty, but the thought of it just makes my tail curl.”

  Smiling at the dainty creature, Rom summoned her back into the secured corner of the world of spirit accessible only through her gems, and tried not to imagine the various concerns Mulligan would express to her later. He already thought she spent too little time with the creatures she had taken responsibility for, and now she was adding a third.

  She dismissed the staff and picked up Ricket’s body, only now noticing a thin leather collar around his neck, from which hung a metal tag. Emblazoned on the tag on one side was the Royal Crest – on the other side was a sigil Rom didn’t recognize. It looked to be associated with one of the colleges, but Rom didn’t know them all. She pulled the tag off and stuffed it into one of her pouches. With that, she made her way back to the junction of Horun Twelve, counting the twists and turns along the path.

  “That was fast, Rom,” Rian beamed. “It must not have given you too much trouble.”

  Rom had already figured out the story to tell them. “It was just an escaped animal from one of the labs, I think – he must have made his way down into the tunnels looking for a way out. I didn’t find a nest or anything. But he didn’t seem very surprised by people, which is why he didn’t run away from Grapp like a regular animal would have.”

  She held the body out towards Talbon, who held up a leather pouch with large red stripes painted on the outside. Rom dropped Ricket’s body into the pouch, and Talbon sealed it up and handed the pouch back. He then stamped her coin a second time and handed that back to her as well.

  “I requested a bit extra on there for you, on account of your good work,” he smiled. “We don’t want to lose you to some other group in case word gets out about how talented you are.” He winked at her in a way she thought a father might naturally do for his own daughter.

  She took the coin and smiled back at them both, then waved to the rest of her crew. “Stop scaring the natives, Grapp,” she teased. Closing the hatch behind her, she made her way back to the stairs and the long climb that awaited her.

  * * * * *

  An hour later, she found herself again in Galden’s office and placed the leather bag on his desk
in the one space not covered in containers. He was sending another communication up the tubes when he looked back at Rom and the leather pouch.

  “Already?” he laughed. “At this rate, girl, I’m gonna stop using these blasted cartridges and just send all my messages with you!”

  She only smiled, flipping him back the work coin. He flipped his glasses back down and examined the stamp. “Hmm? Oh, I see. Clever man, that Talbon.” He pulled out a key and opened a secure box beneath the desk and drew out a substantially larger stack of market chits than Rom had been given before, plus an extra requisition token. “Take this one down to central supply and they’ll upgrade your gear. You’ve been promoted – the rest of that’s all for you, go have some fun.”

  Rom did a brief count – she’d just gotten more than twice what she usually brought in after a week’s worth of hunting, just in one job. Plus, with the new promotion, she qualified for a new residence – maybe even someplace nice. Word must have been getting out about her skill, and they were determined to keep her on the team; a thought which troubled Rom. The last thing she wanted was for word to get out about a white-haired girl who was great with animals.

  When Rom stepped back into the late afternoon light several minutes later, it was with an expression of wonder and contentment of a prisoner who never expected to see the open sky. But beneath that moment of joy, she felt the undercurrent of duty. Each credit she had been given was emblazoned with the stylized face of the Queen – Artifice herself, the embodiment of her enemy and the one who sought Rom’s life the most intensely.

  A promotion might be pleasant and satisfying – but it also brought her more visible, more likely to be discovered by the Queen or one of her minions. Rom sighed. As much as this promotion should have meant to her, it only served to underscore the reality that she did not belong here. Here, she was as much in danger as anywhere – the only difference was that here inside the city she was only a threat to herself, and her friends, still living outside the wall, might be safe.

  She walked to the nearest train station, and waited on the platform for her next line to arrive. Evening would be arriving soon; the sun was even now dropping below the Wall, and Mulligan would be wondering about supper.

  As the train pulled away, a figure stayed within the shadows – his grey cloak kept him more concealed than would the cloaks of his brothers, but his role required a degree of stealth to which they were rarely afforded.

  He observed the small girl with the white hair as she, lost in her thoughts, stepped aboard the train and rode off. She was a conundrum, this one. His mistress had commanded them all to be watchful for young girls with white hair and glowing gems, but this one kept much of herself concealed, so any spirit gems she might possess could easily be hidden: thus she remained a candidate. But what had set her in his sights was the smell she carried with her.

  It lingered as she had passed him earlier – faint, nearly imperceptible, but definitive. She carried with her a trace of the Induru. He’d had a report of one of their corrupteds escaping and being destroyed, and only a Sheharid had the power to accomplish a feat of that magnitude. If she were the one, then he would bring her before his Mistress.

  And if she were not… in a city of this size, people often went missing without suspicion or alarm. Either way, the rewards would be his.

  Chapter 7: Looking Forward

  Cousins steadied his heart rate. The last thing he wanted to do now was to show weakness, or let these people know how trapped he felt. They could smell fear, taste uncertainty, and had no reluctance to pounce upon either if they felt they could get the upper hand. After almost two years of steering the once-criminal organization given to him by Favo Carr, he had faced more than ten assassination attempts – not counting another ten or twenty otherwise presumed to have been “convenient accidents” – and was once held for three days by a would-be competitor and beaten to the point of death before being rescued by his men. But nothing in all those months had prepared him for this.

  “…and so, furthermore, may it please the council to know that agricultural forecasts in the grain guild are predicted to be at plus four percent, give or take two percent on account of the unreliability of establishing concise precipitation figures for the chronological date range in question. Additionally, weighing this against the Millers guild’s output estimates for the ensuing quarter, we must be alert to not taking these equations for granted…”

  The blonde-haired 16-year-old chewed on the inside of his cheek in an effort to maintain his composure. He wanted to vault the conference table and make a break for it. Sadly, the other commissioners would likely frown upon such an assault upon council etiquette. It was bad enough in the minds of the other council members that so young a lad sat among them as if their equal, the last thing he wanted to do was prove their concerns valid. Cousins was the youngest member to the council since its formation more than two hundred years, and many members had initially opposed his appointment – not merely because of his age, but because in spite of his assistance with the “Great Troubles” two years earlier, his entire organization was still not yet trusted at large within the town.

  Certainly, crime overall was down, and through their work as a sort of ancillary police force, the Nightwatch (as they had come to be known), had also taken pride in assisting in a variety of community services. Just last month, they had helped provide the supplies and labor necessary to rebuild one of the local Mason Guild’s forges. It had only suffered two days of down time, a mere fraction of the estimated time they would have otherwise experienced. The good deeds they had performed for the community were known well enough, but the specter of all they had done – or had been reputed to have done – loomed over them.

  He and his organization’s shift captains were proud of the progress they’d made – their recruitment logs were overflowing, and they had a better inflow of capital than they’d ever achieved with Favo at the helm – it was impressive how much an organization could retain when vast percentages were not spent out in bribing the local officials. But with the success and respectability came responsibility. And when Cousins was nominated for a vacated councilmember position, he allowed the flattery of the act to cloud his better judgment. Before he knew it, he was spending one full day of every week in mind-numbing meetings involving motions, debates and discussions about agricultural forecasts.

  Cousins looked up to see that all eyes were on him, expectantly.

  “Er, sorry,” he waved his hand idly. “I was… doing the next quarter’s math in my head. Could you repeat that?”

  Bron Fallstir, the head of the Smithy’s union nodded his large head. “We were just wondering if you’d object to wrapping early, or if you had any other items to bring to the table?”

  Cousins held up a finger while he pretended to do additional figures and eventually reach an agreeable total. “Yes, ah, I believe I’m content until next week. Let us adjourn.”

  Bron and two other representatives from the colleges stood and walked out, continuing an earlier conversation regarding advances in bonding stabilization magic crafting and the impact of moisture-resistant tolerances in steam-driven pressure redistribution. Thalin Myrrdwin paused to repeat her earlier gratitude to Cousins for a recent community safety project the Nightwatch group had performed in her neighborhood; Cousins did his best to maintain a proper face with all these things, while he secretly yearned to be nearly anywhere but here.

  Life had been simpler only a few years before, he thought. He’d made his way through a complex network of favors and information exchange, due mostly to his charm and charisma giving him a vast number of people across the town. People simply knew that they needed something and couldn’t find it, Cousins was the person to see. “I’ve got a cousin who can get that for you,” he’d say, and before long the reference stuck. The truth was that he’d never known his actual family, simply passed from one home to the next until, by the age of eight, he had been making his own way on the street.
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  He continued to shake hands and exchange pleasantries, all in a delicately careful process intended to lead him out of the building and down to the street. Waiting for him there was his two-wheeled steam-powered vehicle, given to him as an incentive to take over Favo’s business ventures. He’d had it painted nearly black, with a stylized pair of eyes on each side as the symbol of his organization.

  Swinging one leg across the seat of his Runabout, he held to the handlebars and slid the key into the security lock, disengaging the control on the compression coils. With an additional twist of the key, the two heating tanks spun against one another with a soft hiss, mixing a pair of chemicals together into the incendiary chamber. These two liquids quick-heated, converting the cycled water of the coils into flash steam.

  He smiled, feeling the slight buck of the cycle as the engine primed. Pulling a pair of goggles from his inner vest pocket, he slipped them over his mussed blonde hair and onto his eyes. His hair was getting a bit unruly, more so than normal. One of these days, he would have to get around to visiting the barber and get it looking proper again. That thought reminded him of the increasing need he was seeing of getting a good shave. He’d turned sixteen a short time back, and nature had responded by coating the increasingly sharp line of his jaw with a faint wisp of stubble. How did Favo ever find time to maintain his image with so much work to do? Cousins wondered.

  Cousins flipped a pair of toggle switches – these balanced the rate of the incendiary mix and the flow of the steam through the coils, according to Kari – leaned the machine into a fully upright position and kicked up the balance bar. Then, with a slight depression on the accelerator pedal, he held on tight as the Runabout left the city legislative building quickly behind.

  He had a few hours to himself before he’d need to be back to the office, so he took the opportunity to enjoy the feel of the wind through his hair and the frequent smiles and waves of greeting from the people who recognized him as he sped by. He passed near enough the original settlements to drink in their aging melancholia – their eventual and inevitable decomposition betrayed the first settlers beyond the wall, and their disbelief at being exiled from the only civilization they had ever known, as well as the marked lack of functional skills they had at that time possessed.