Steampunk Tales, Volume 1

by Ren Cummins

  The other professors were going to be mad at her. Not only if they found that she’d invented something which was so dramatically in violation of their primary laws, but that she took it out into the air. Additionally, she was supposed to have been teaching one of the initiatory classes this morning, something she’d only just now remembered.

  At this rate, she’d not only lose her laboratory, but she’d be lucky if they didn’t throw her out of the school and kick her out of the city. Or worse.

  “Cousins?” she called back. “You’re on the town council now; what do you suppose they’re going to do to us when we get back?” She shifted the levers again, banking around a sharp corner in the canyon.

  To her annoyance, he laughed. “Now who’s being an optimist? I say we just explore that question when we’re on our way back, and all this danger is well behind us.”

  Favo nudged him. “Her question is valid. Of all of us, she is the most likely to be held accountable for this crime of flight. Although,” he added, “what we find here may be of sufficient value to the people of Oldtown that they might be willing to accept her actions.”

  “It would have to be a substantial find,” Cousins pointed out. “That council can be pretty stubborn on the finer points of law.”

  Kari nearly stood up in her seat as the canyon opened wide around them. “Would that be the kind of thing you’d like us to find?”

  Ahead of them on the broad canyon expanse rose a tremendous structure of stone and metal, precipitated by a wide road leading up to a great stairway. Trees inexplicably grew at regular patterned intervals around the area, creating a lush canopy that concealed the remainder of the canyon floor, but left the road, stairs and buildings before them exposed to the sky.

  The building itself looked to be half the size of the Wall – but impressively resembled the jutting pointed rocks that lined the canyon walls, though more stylized and structured. The base tier that rose just above the treetop was comprised of a dozen bronze parapets; the tier above that had nine, then six, then three. The top tier stood twice as tall alone as any of the other tiers, and had a flat top with a raised wall along the perimeter. They flew around this top tier, rising high enough to look down on the top of the platform.

  Cousins leaned over Favo to look down with his glasses. “I can see a doorway at the edge, there. I think we could land there.”

  Kari looked down, but shook her head. “Too risky, and too windy. I don’t want the Ariana to be pushed off.”

  Favo nodded, pointing back towards the base of the main stairway. “Is there enough space for you down on the road leading in?”

  Kari nodded. “Hold on, everyone, I’m taking us down.”

  But Rom held up her hand. “I better go check and make sure it’s safe. We saw all those monsters on the way here; there might be more underneath all those trees.” Without waiting for their agreement, she hopped from the ship.

  Mulligan shook his head. “I’m so sorry; I’ve been trying to stop her from doing that. She’s stubborn.”

  The other three simply nodded and looked to see where Rom had landed.

  Rom dropped onto the third tier of the building, rolling and coming back up onto her feet. She brushed herself off and looked around, and summoned her crook just in case of danger. The stones of the floor were unlike anything she’d felt before, and yet felt familiar, somehow. She reminded herself of her current task, and hopped up onto the ledge, then jumped down again to the next tier.

  The construction of each tier was similar to the one before it, so she assumed it had all been designed or built around the same time, but the dirt encrusting it all had been here for a while; she found plants and small trees growing out of the accumulated dirt on several of the tiers. Vines grew in abundance along the walls and floors of the top walkways of each projected floor, and by the time she landed on the ground itself, she was not surprised to see thick undergrowth covering the road. In between the many paving stones fitted together were thick shrubs and growth not readily apparent from the air.

  She gave herself a long moment to let her ears adjust to the lack of noise – several hours of travel in the airship had made her ears ring, but they now accommodated the relative lack of noise here beneath the tree cover. The first thing of note was the lack of animal sounds. No birdcalls, insects – the only thing she could even hear was the faint wind through the trees, and the hum of the airship as it continued to circle down towards her. Content, she raised her arms and waved them down.

  The airship stopped circling and began to come down for a landing, and Rom decided to look around a bit more as she waited. She took the stairs twenty at a time, coming to the top in only five small jumps. The archway led into an open courtyard; the ceiling was shaped like an inverted bowl, reminding her briefly of the chambers of music in the college of kinesthesiology. But what drew her attention were the dozens of statues around the courtyard. They had been carved somehow from a solid light-grey stone, though they looked real enough to have been once been actual people, painted with a thin coating of glaze.

  Each statue was of a person wielding a different weapon – sword, mace, staff and many weapons whose names she did not know. They were beautifully crafted, clearly made with affection and reverence – and something seemed strangely familiar to her. She blinked, and in her mind’s eye she flashed back to the orphanage. They had often been told the old structure had been built on to and around an abandoned temple, dedicated to the old gods. The statues to these gods were still visible in a simple courtyard in which the children were allowed to play each day as the sun came over the wall and shone down.

  Those statues at the orphanage were worn and vague, any details which might originally have been carved into them long since lost to time and the elements. Additionally, Rom and Kari had noticed that those statues whose arms or hands were still attached had always seemed to be frozen in the middle of one action or another, but anything they might have held had been stripped away. And now Rom understood why: these were the same statues – or at least were designed to be the same statues – but protected as they were against the elements, they were still very detailed. The young Sheharid could see the smallest details – their eyebrows and lashes – on some she fancied that she could even make out the pores of their skin.

  Then Rom noticed on one of the statues, small gems embedded upon different places on their bodies. She gasped – these statues weren’t “old gods” at all: they were Sheharid Is’iin!

  Another shocking thought then occurred to her. What if, she realized as her heart pounded in her chest, the Sheharid Is’iin were the old gods?

  Rom moved quickly around the courtyard, finally nearly dropping her staff when she looked up at a statue which was clearly made to represent Memory. It was clear in all the details: her long flowing hair, her kind but sad expression. The thin but elegant staff she always carried with her.

  In moments, she found Force and Inertia, as well. They looked exactly as she had always known them – Force’s enraged scowl and Inertia’s clever smile were expertly captured in the stone.

  So stunned was Rom by the statues themselves that she almost did not hear her friends step into the courtyard behind her.

  Kari walked to her and placed a hand on her shoulder, causing her to start.

  “Rom,” she asked, “what are these statues? They look familiar, kind of.”

  Mulligan landed on Rom’s other shoulder, uncharacteristically quiet. He looked over at Kari, but said nothing.

  “They’re Reapers.” Rom’s voice sounded detached and distant. She thought maybe one of the statues was saying it, and not her. “All of them.” She pointed at the three statues she knew. “That’s Memory, Force, and that’s Inertia over there.”

  “Ooh, he’s cute,” Kari said, but instantly felt ashamed for saying so.

  “It’s just weird to see them all here, it makes me…I don’t know, I guess I miss them. I never really thought about it, but they used to be alive, too.” S
he took a deep breath, steadied herself against the unusually strong surge of emotions she felt.

  Kari held her friend and they looked at the statues in silence.

  They began to walk towards the broad stairs that led up from the statuary at the far side of the rotunda, until Rom stopped in her tracks. Kari turned to her friend to ask what she had seen, but Rom had looked up at a pair of statues relatively nearby. These two were of men – neither, however, held traditional weapons in their hands. One, with his long hair pulled back into a familiar ponytail, had a stack of cards in one hand and was extending the other hand as if frozen in the moment of throwing one of the cards forward. Cousins shuddered. It was undeniably Ian, carved into a phenomenal likeness.

  The other man looked unfamiliar to any of them – he seemed older than the rest of the Sheharid captured in detailed relief, and his face was tranquility incarnate. But Cousins noticed that Rom was not looking at his face at all, but to his right hand raised near his chest.

  In that hand, he held nothing but a simple pocket watch.

  Chapter 19: Images of the Past

  Cousins walked around the statues until he noticed inscriptions at the base of each one. They were written in unusual characters, nothing he understood. “Favo,” he called to the other man, who was also examining some of the statues on the opposite side of the courtyard to where they had come in.

  Instead of responding, Favo gestured to Cousins to come over to him.

  Favo was standing between two of the statues, which were facing one another, both female Sheharid. One held in her hands two small blades with three separate but parallel points. On her body an amazing array of other weapons were also visible: daggers, small staves, even a pair of pistols. She held her two multi-bladed daggers straight out, creating a kind of archway with the weapon held by the other woman – a familiar curving staff.

  Cousins followed the staff to the other statue’s hands, and from there to her shoulder, upon which sat a familiar creature with batwings and curving horns to accentuate his face. The woman’s face was familiar, as well – with two glittering purple gems beset in her forehead and, though she was designed to look like a woman in her early twenties, was unmistakably that of their friend, Rom.

  “Should we bring her over here?” Cousins whispered.

  Favo shrugged. “She’s going to see it eventually.”

  Cousins looked over and saw Rom and Kari standing beneath the nearby male statues, and he felt a gentle ache in his chest at the perfect representation of their old friend Ian.

  “How is this possible?” he asked. “These statues are hundreds of years old – older than the Wall, even – but they carved him perfectly!”

  “Ian was quite old,” Favo said in an attempt to put things in some sort of perspective. Even with his few years of study in magic, things like this struck with incredulity. “But they made a statue of Rom that won’t look accurate for several years. I don’t…” he shook his head. “I don’t understand this at all.”

  Rom and Kari eventually noticed the two young men standing nearby and walked over to look at the two final statues. Mulligan flapped up to examine the carved simulacrum of himself.

  “I’m never going to get much bigger,” he sighed. “Though it would seem my horns will grow in quite impressively.” He landed on the statue Rom’s outstretched arm. “I would have to say this is in fact you, at some point at least seven years in the future.”

  Rom shook her head. “It’s impossible! How did they know? How could someone know about me so long ago?”

  Cousins shook his head. “With these glasses, I can see some things before they happen – like our airship, for example. I knew just what it would look like, and that there’d be four of us riding away, and…” he scratched his head. “Curious.”

  “What is?” Rom asked him.

  His mouth twisted slightly as he struggled to follow his own chain of logic. “Well, I saw the image of the ship, and so told Kari of it. She then built it and we flew away in it. So what happened, happened because I saw it happening and then… ouch, that hurts my mind.”

  “Let it go, lad,” Favo clapped him on the shoulder. “Madness lies in wait of the unwary philosopher.”

  Nodding, Cousins decided that agreeing with Favo’s observation felt much less disorienting than the alternative.

  Rom pointed at the strange symbols on the pedestals beneath the statues – every statue, including hers, had a series of them. They looked to Rom’s eyes like letters, but were unfamiliar to her.

  Mulligan nodded. “It’s from a language written before even Memory’s time,” he said. “Maybe a thousand years old.”

  Favo whistled. “You believe, then, the statues are that old, as well? This would make this place older than the Wall and the city.”

  “Perhaps,” Rom’s furred friend replied. He looked towards Cousins. “Can your glasses look back that far?”

  Cousins slipped the goggles down and began dialing them back. He rewound the lenses several times, until the day and night flashes of light to dark no longer even flashed, but blurred together in a mild grey blur of half-light. He shook his head. “I’ve never tried turning them back that far, I’m not sure. No, I’m going back and back and back… wait.”

  He paused as something else blurred between the statues; first moving the dials forward, then back, more and more slowly and in increasingly smaller increments, until he found it. “Hmmm… it’s a group of people with really unusual clothing – it’s very shiny and looks like metal, only flexible like cloth. They’re walking around the statues; nothing interesting, though. Let me go back further.” He dialed back even more, when suddenly the lenses went black.

  “That’s strange,” he said. “It just stops; the dials won’t turn back any further.” He turned the dial in the opposite way and saw people again. The statues were still here, only looking very clean and new. He took the glasses off and examined the dials, doing the math in his head. “This says I’ve gone back one thousand and seventy-two years, but then it just stops.”

  Kari leaned forward to examine the dials. “What does that mean? Why would they design them to only go back that far, and no further??”

  He shrugged, putting the Looking Glasses back on his forehead. “I’m not sure – perhaps it wasn’t a choice so much as a limitation. Well, I do enjoy a good mystery.”

  Favo sighed, shaking his head and walking up the stairs. “It’s not enough that you take over my business and try to dress like me as well? There is really only room for one of me in any gathering.”

  Cousins rolled his eyes but followed the older man up, with the two girls coming up after.

  The top stair became a generous entryway landing; thousands of flat-cut stones were perfectly laid beside one another in a spiraling radiant pattern leading out from the double bronze doors that hung flush against the wall.

  Favo was the first to reach the door; he placed a hand against the smooth metal and rested his ear to it.

  Cousins walked beside him, staring quizzically at the taller man. “Is anyone home?” he asked with a smirk.

  Sighing exasperatedly, Favo pushed against the door. “Locked,” he explained, pushing again for effect. The doors did not even tremble – for all their reaction, the entire face of the building might have been carved from a solid casting of the metal, devoid of any moving parts.

  “So how do we get in?” Kari asked.

  “I could go back up and check that door on the roof,” Rom offered.

  Favo shook his head. “Too far away. It might take you days to find the way back down here to us. He looked instead at Cousins, who was already nodding, thumbing through one of his packs of cards.

  “I brought extra this time,” he explained. “One deck just in case we get into any fights, but this deck – aha!” he pulled a card out and motioned for the others to stand back. “This deck is for everything else.”

  He flicked the card into the doorway, and the spell activated, causing the pape
r to evaporate into a fine mist.

  A low clicking sound trickled from somewhere behind the doors; slowly at first, then rapidly escalating into a rush of sound, like rain on many leaves. It reached a dramatic climax and then stopped all together with a series of four much louder clicks.

  “Those are gears,” Kari said. “I think the doors are locked by some kind of mechanism!”

  Silence filled the air again. Favo’s eyebrows arched. “Is that it?”

  Cousins shrugged, gesturing for Favo to try again at the doors. Favo stepped forward, tentatively placed his hands on the doors and pressed again. This time, they swung open easily.

  Favo looked into the darkness, shaking his head. “Fantastic.” He reached into his satchel, and pulled out a pair of tubes, filled with a pale red liquid. He handed one to Kari and held the other one up, shaking it until the liquid mixed and began to glow. “It works just like that. It’ll last about an hour until the chemicals separate, and then you just shake it again.”

  Kari did as he explained, holding up a glowing reddish tube as a result.

  “Oh, and if it breaks, do try not to get any on you. It can be rather… uncomfortable.”

  She nodded, and now held the light tube much further from herself.

  Cousins changed the lenses from looking into the past to one which allowed him to see in the dark, and placed the goggles back over his eyes. Rom drew her crook, but realized that her eyes seemed to adjust quite well to the darkness all on their own.

  “Let’s move towards the wall over here,” Favo said, waving his arm towards the right. His voice echoed broadly in the black; he’d never been in a room that bore this manner of acoustics. He remembered a bit of the kinesthetics classes he’d taken as a lad; part of the skills they had taught was the use of sound to determine surroundings. He snapped his fingers, and counted the reverberations, as well as the time between them.

  He frowned. This room was enormous – the cleanliness of the echoes indicated a variety of interfering objects – judging by the courtyard, he assumed there would be more décor than function inside this building – and the columns that they approached along the walls supported his theory. But the strongest unimpeded echoes came from a slightly curved surface – a ceiling, he supposed – which was most likely thirty to forty meters high. This extended just past the lowest exterior tier, which he’d originally assumed would mirror the interior floors. This building is just going to be full of surprises, he thought ruefully.