Steampunk Tales, Volume 1

by Ren Cummins

  Goya nodded, slowly. Summer was fading; there was a hint of crispness in the air that foreshadowed the impending autumn – though, to the townspeople of an essentially agricultural community, the seasons were emblazoned on their souls. They knew the changing of times in their bones, felt it more and more clearly as they grew older.

  And Goya was older than most.

  Briseida helped her to her feet, took her slowly into the next room where a small plate of fruit and soup waited on a table near the parlor window. She waited with her until Goya had finished most of the food, and then helped the old woman prepare for bed. She did this in silence as they did each night, and it was not until she paused to turn down the lights that Goya said another word.

  “Please be sure to make up one of the old guest rooms,” she said. Briseida nodded. She didn’t need to ask which one. She smiled and took a slow, contented breath before dousing the lights and closing the door behind her.

  Chapter 9: Shenanigan Frustration

  “Stop complaining,” Rom chided Mulligan. “At least it’s not raining tonight.”

  “True, but there’s just not enough room in here for me and… him.” Mulligan emphasized his point by pushing back against the other creature he was sharing Rom’s pack with.

  Rickets glared back at him in the relative darkness of the bag. “I’m not thrilled about this either, Molly.”

  “Mully!” Mulligan corrected him, not for the first time.

  Rom lightly elbowed the pack. “Hush! We’re getting close, Rickets. Are you sure you can tell us what building they’d had you in?”

  Ignoring Mulligan’s exclamations of discomfort, Rickets pushed up and squeezed the top of his head out for visibility. “Pretty sure.” He nudged Rom’s shoulder. “I think it’s that big boxy one over there. Yeah, the one with the three pointy things on the top.”

  “The spires?”

  “Yeah, whatever. The pointy things.” There was a bit more commotion in the pack, accompanied by additional noises of pain and anger.

  “Stop it, you two,” Rom hissed. “It’s coming up now, we’re going to jump.”

  She waited until she could get a good bearing on potential landing points, and rose up to the balls of her feet, one hand on the roof of the train for balance. Just as the lead car of the train sped past the first of the three spires atop the building, Rom kicked off and covered the remaining distance across the roadway in a few moments.

  Her aim was good in spite of her relative lack of practice – the soles of her boots skidded to a stop in a narrow circular platform surrounding the base of one of the spires. She dropped low below the railing and got a good look around.

  “No guards,” she observed quietly. “I’m surprised they don’t take care of their buildings better. Shenanigans could happen.”

  * * * * *

  Ten minutes later, Rom was standing at the far side of the street and suffering from pronounced shenanigan-frustration.

  “Okay, this does NOT make sense,” she fumed. “A building has to have a door. Or a window. Or something.” She clenched her fists and tried not to hit the wall of the building behind her. Mulligan and Rickets sat on her shoulders, looking at the unusual structure.

  “I mean, who even makes a building like that?”

  “The Divine Institute of Astheniology and Aretaics, I would guess,” Rickets said, pointing at the sign facing them. It was written in bold and elegant letters, arching over an otherwise blank wall – save for a large image of the royal crest.

  “She can read, Rickets,” Mulligan hissed.

  “Just being helpful,” came the pithy reply.

  Glaring sideways at the other creature, Mully grumbled, “You were more interesting when you couldn’t speak well.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Hush, you two,” Rom chided them. “I’m trying to figure this out.”

  She frowned to no one in particular. This sort of thing was a bit beyond her skills. If something needed to be beaten up, sure, but she was never good at subtlety. Planning wasn’t even on the menu.

  “We need help with this,” she said.

  Mulligan groaned. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  Rickets sighed, crawling back into the pack. “I don’t, either. This place is getting pretty crowded as it is.”

  * * * * *

  “You’re sure about this, Rom?”

  “I already told you, Mully, no.” Rom looked at the tiny key in her hand, and back towards the old doorway in the alleyway. It sure didn’t look like much, but it was the only doorway she could find down below the tower Favo had indicated. She took a deep breath and almost immediately regretted it at the stench of the alley. “But when am I sure about anything?” she mused.

  Wrinkling her nose, she inserted the key into a keyhole which looked older than the building itself – which was old enough to begin with – and tried to turn it. However, the key would not rotate in either direction.

  “What’s wrong?” Mulligan asked.

  Rom frowned with the effort. “It won’t budge.”

  “Well, don’t break it.”

  “Are you using the right key?” Rickets offered from the relative safety of the backpack.

  “You’re not helping,” Mulligan hissed.

  “I’m only offering my opinion.”

  “We didn’t ask you.”

  “Neither one of you are helping,” Rom growled. She looked at the key, still carefully balanced in the lock. It didn’t make sense – it fit perfectly, she had felt the gentle shiver of the key sliding past the tumblers in the lock – but try as she did, the key would not turn.

  “Maybe we have the wrong door,” offered the voice from the pack.

  Mulligan slapped the top of the pack. “Would you be quiet?”

  Rom sighed, shaking her head. What was she doing here, anyway? She didn’t even know Favo that well – she’d only met him a few times, and most of those events had involved weapons being drawn. In fact, now that she thought of it, there’d been a weapon involved every time he’d been around. Favo Carr was pretty much the living example of what Kari called Dead Steam – water used so long to power the steam engines that it wasn’t good for anything else.

  Ignoring the whispered argument which continued between Mulligan and Rickets, Rom pulled the key out of the lock and turned to go home. But a low vibration made her pause in her tracks. She looked back at the door and watched as it seemed to fold into ten narrow bands and slide into the doorjamb. A number of soft incandescent lights illumined in a small circle on the floor of the center of the doorway and a row of small discs blinked to glowing life about waist-high on the interior wall.

  Rom glanced around the alley to make sure they were alone, chiding herself for not doing so earlier.

  “Wow,” Mulligan breathed.

  There was movement in her pack. “What? What is it?”

  Mulligan tried to shush Rickets, but the latter simply poked his head up from the pack and looked over Rom’s shoulder at the lighted doorway. “Yes, wow,” he echoed. “Well, I was right, we definitely have the right door.”

  “What?” Mulligan said, incredulous.

  Rom hushed them both and stepped inside the doorway. Looking more closely at the small lit circles on the wall, she could now read small designs on each of them. “Are these letters, Mulligan?” she asked, tracing one of them with her fingertip. “I don’t understand them.”

  Mulligan shook his head. “No, they’re numbers. Old numbers, like from Memory’s time.” He pointed with a small paw towards the top one. “That’s the highest one, I think that’s where Favo would be.”

  Raising a single eyebrow, Rom half-smiled. “I don’t think he’s small enough to fit in there, Mully.”

  “No, no, you press that circle, and this room will go to him.”

  Humoring her friend, Rom pushed against the highest button with her finger, saying, “Well, okay, but I don’t see how - - - - - whoa!”

  No sooner had she pressed
her fingers against the circle than the door behind her closed and she felt the press of gravity wash over her if they were being launched into the air. She braced herself against the wall, but in a moment, the room came to a stop. The wall folded down to the floor until it had practically vanished completely. Rom stepped from the smooth circle and onto an ornately woven rug.

  She now found herself in a room that appeared to be a quarter-slice of a large circle. Other than the rug and a couple of chairs, the room was mostly empty. Along one wall was a simple doorway, beside which were several pairs of boots. She walked through the single doorway on one of the flat walls into another room of roughly the same size but with substantially more furniture. Tables, dressers, and an impressively stocked weapon rack; half of one wall had perhaps twenty hooks from which hung a variety of jackets and hats.

  “This is definitely Favo’s place,” Rom muttered, recalling the gentleman’s predilection for elegant clothing.

  “Oh, my dear, this is nothing at all,” came the voice from the doorway. “You should see my summer home.”

  A chair on wheels rolled into view in the next room, Favo seated and leaning back. He spun the chair around, and gestured for Rom to come over, before kicking off with his feet and disappearing once more from view.

  This new room was much larger than the other two – or at least seemed so – and made up the remainder of the column within the tower. Another doorway, its double doors closed, could be seen at the far side of the room, but the remainder of the room was filled, floor to ceiling with items that defied Rom’s comprehension.

  Mulligan remained silent. He’d never quite trusted Favo, ever since he and his then-partner Molla had kidnapped him and threatened to cut him open. Rickets, his whiskers flickering curiously, jumped from the pack.

  “Not so fast,” Rom chided, placing her finger against one of the two gems in her forehead. With a soft purple flash of light, Rickets vanished.

  “Thank you,” Mulligan said. “That one is going to require a good deal of training.”

  Rom shushed him, and continued to look around the room.

  Favo’s rolling chair sat positioned in the interior of a curving desk, atop which where various objects which reminded Rom of the moving paintings in Memory’s home. On the surfaces of them all were various places, people moving to and fro. Rom counted more than twenty of these paintings, which were of different sizes and shapes – some rectangular, some circular, some the size of Rom’s head, while one ran half the length of the table itself. Different-colored strings came from the backs of the paintings, and disappeared into the floor.

  “Come over here, you’ll get a better look at them,” Favo said. He scooted the chair backwards and stood up, offering Rom a seat. She shook her head at the chair, choosing instead to lean closer to the paintings. Reaching out a curious finger, she touched the surface of one of the paintings, causing ripples to distort and warp the image for a few moments after she withdrew her finger.

  “It’s…warm,” she said, wiping the moisture off onto a small area of the hem of her dress.

  Favo nodded. “I’m not really sure how it works, but they show what things look like from a long way off, and make the water show it here. I think your friend Kari would lose her poor mind to see one of these.”

  Rom looked over her shoulder at him. “How long have you been living here?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I came over right after I gave Cousins the shop,” he explained. “I’ve been back a few times since, just to check on things. But I must say I’m enjoying the life this city offers a clever young man such as myself.”

  Stepping out of the curving table, Rom walked around the room, examining his displayed gear. She couldn’t imagine what most of it was for, but a few things she assumed were more advanced forms of the steamshot rifle he used to favor. “This city doesn’t make sense,” she said, surprising herself with her candor.

  “Of course it does,” Favo answered, turning a dial on the table. Two of the screens flickered and changed to different images. “It’s just a long ways from Oldtown, and there’s no magic here.”

  She chewed on her bottom lip. “Well, nothing like back at home,” she replied.

  “True enough. Though to be honest, I’m of half a mind to smuggle some of these bits and baubles back under the wall and change the game a bit.”

  “What’s stopping you?”

  Favo laughed softly. “Not worth the risk. I have a few different ways that can get me safely back to the old streets, but if I were caught with some of these things…well, there are some crimes for which there simply isn’t a sufficient bribe.”

  Rom placed a long leather belt with a row of pouches on it back on its shelf. “Is it easy? Getting across the wall, that is.”

  He shrugged. “Probably not so hard as being born, I should think.” Seeing that she was serious, he shuffled off his amused expression. “There are a series of tunnels that lead beneath the wall. I’ve made my way through them, but it requires a bit of a payoff to the guards that patrol the area.”

  “Guards?” Rom frowned. If they were at all still looking for her, there was little chance she could get past them that way.

  “Rom, child, why are you here?” he asked her directly.

  She stammered, “Wh-what do you mean? You invited me!”

  “No,” he laughed, “I meant, why are you here in the city?”

  “Oh.” Rom looked at her feet, then back at Favo. “You know…what I am, right?”

  He nodded.

  “The way it always works, I guess is that that there’s always two of us, always.” She bit her lip nervously. “Well, the other one…she’s trying to kill me.”

  “Kill you? Why would they do that? Won’t you just come back? Or another one, anyway.”

  “She wants to kill me and keep my soul – it makes her more powerful. She’s already done it to others, before I came.”

  The edges of Favo’s mouth turned downwards. “Others, you say? And I would assume if she uses their powers, it makes her substantially more powerful than you, yes?”

  Rom nodded at his assumption.

  “And are you here to hide from her? Or…” his eyes returned to the moving paintings. “…Are you looking for her?”

  “Both. There’s so many people, I thought she might not be able to find me.”

  “A decent plan,” he concurred. “So, then, have you any leads? Have you found this evil Reaper among the fair citizens of Aesirium?”

  She nodded somberly. “It’s the Queen.”

  Favo coughed in surprise. “The Queen? The royal daughter herself? Are you sure?”

  “In the world where souls go after they die – it’s a place that looks just like this world, only without all the buildings and things. But right where the palace is in this world, there’s a big castle in that world. And that’s where the other…it’s where Artifice lives.”

  She continued, holding out the patch she’d taken off the sandman the other evening. “And I think I know where those dead soldiers are being made – in one of the royal schools. In fact, that’s why I came here. I need your help.”

  “Ah, and here I ventured to think you’d come out of a sense of nostalgia for your old friend Favo, or to perhaps thank me for saving your life the other evening.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Thank you,” she said dryly. “But I do need your help.”

  “You have but to ask, my dear. How may I be of assistance?”

  “I need to break into one of the Royal colleges.”

  Chapter 10: Home Again

  “It’s impossible,” Favo said, looking across the street at the building’s false entryway. He tapped the small vial of liquid he held in his hand. “There’s no way in.”

  Rom looked at the vial – it was filled with a viscous liquid the color of the sky in summer. “How does that thing tell you there’s no way in?”

  Favo looked confused, then followed Rom’s eyes to the vial, and chuckled. “Oh, this doe
sn’t tell me that. This just makes sure no one knows we’re here. It’s a tube of compressed distraction magic. So long as it stays moving, no one will notice us here.”

  “So how do you know there’s no way in?” she pressed.

  Favo shrugged. “There’s no door.”

  Growling softly, Rom buried her face in her hands. “I told you that!”

  He patted her shoulder, which accomplished exactly the opposite of calming her down. Clearly – or intentionally – oblivious to her rising frustration, he added, “But also, there are no paths or tracks leading in. The streets are clear enough, but no one ever goes in there from out here. There must be another way in – and those towers are too narrow, so I’d suppose something from below.”

  Favo nodded, shifting the vial across his knuckles. “Yes, but it is a fair sight more complex than a simple matter of directions. You see, in order to gain access to the Royal colleges, you shall need to first find yourself within the Royal palace. And while I have managed such a thing in the past, getting you in would require a much more coordinated stock of talents. I suspect such an adventure might well be beyond even my impressive skills.”

  Rom sighed. “This is annoying.”

  “I would be willing to assist you, however. The enemies of my friend are my enemies,” he said with a lopsided smile. “But we shall need others. And we shall certainly need a plan.”

  Behind him in the distance, Rom could see the last traces of sunset silhouetted against the Wall. Not so far away, she thought to herself. She sighed.

  “Your two friends, then?” he divined.

  Nodding, she replied in a voice that sounded at once tired and anxious. “If they’re still talking to me.”

  He placed a hand on her shoulder. “They are your friends. It might be difficult, but they will forgive you.”

  She nodded again, but her frown reappeared.