Steampunk Tales, Volume 1

by Ren Cummins

  Cousins fiddled with the apertures of the goggles, but shook his head. “I don’t think they ever figure it out; at least not while I’m around to see it.”

  The older man scratched his chin then smoothed out the material of his vest. “I’m not certain that’s reassuring, and I do not always appreciate a good mystery,” he said. “We need to decide on a way out of here, hopefully past those soldiers, and quickly.”

  “Why quickly?” Kari asked.

  “Reinforcements,” Cousins said. “It’s obvious they’ve seen your craft, so they know we’re here, but don’t know where. So they’ll probably bring additional people here to help find us.”

  Kari snapped her fingers, a dull metal clank echoing from the gauntlets, as she was still wearing them. “Wait! They had to get this thing in here somehow,” she said, pointing at the machine. “And if that tunnel back there is too small…”

  “And the stairway we came up is likewise too narrow,” Favo added.

  “Right,” Cousins nodded. “So there might be a door up here somewhere. But where?” He again twisted one of the lenses of his goggles, until, with a satisfied expression, pointed directly above them. “There – about ten meters across, a large patch of fitted stone tiles. I believe that’s our best bet.”

  Rom looked straight up, shifting the weight of the large sword in her hands. “Let me check,” she said and, with a mighty swing of the sword, leapt straight up into the darkness above them, the gleaming point of the sword leading the way.

  She swallowed back a moment’s fear as she was engulfed in the oppressive blackness which lay untouched by the luminescence of the room below her, only an intermittent sparkling from the blade as it led her deeper into the unknown. With an impact that she felt along her arm and down her spine to her knees, the sword burst through a surprisingly thin portion of rock, the momentum carrying her through the fractured stones and into the daylight. Kicking high with her right foot, she spun over to land behind the small hole onto one of the platforms that served as the terraced rooftops of the temple. Above her, the staggered tiers narrowed into the point upon which she’d earlier landed, and below she could see the full structure culminating in the tree-lined road and entryway courtyard.

  There was movement down by the main doors – several white dots milling about. A few of them were near Kari’s airship, and it appeared as if they had done something to the large balloons – they were lying limply atop the gondola. Rom frowned. “Kari’s gonna be mad,” she muttered to herself.

  With a soft fluttering of his leathern wings, Mulligan landed beside her. He, too, squinted down into the clearing that led to the doors of the temple. “Not good, Rom. I count about twelve of them, there are probably more inside, trying to figure out where we are.”

  “And without the ship, we’re not leaving in a hurry,” Rom added.

  Mulligan nodded in agreement. “We should help the others get up here so we can decide what to do next,” he offered.

  Cousins used one of his cards to conjure up a rope, which they tied off from one of the balcony stones and dropped the free end down into the room below. One by one, Kari, Cousins and Favo made their way up the rope to the rooftop. Each of them added their own expressions of concern when assessing their situation. Rom’s prediction of Kari’s temperament proved accurate; Rom and Cousins had to hold her back once she saw what had been done to her airship.

  As they huddled out of sight, they discussed their options.

  “I don’t believe the idea of remaining here until they’ve gone away is our best choice, but it does remain a viable alternative to the use of force,” Favo said, holding up his hands at Kari’s imminent objection. “But the longer we wait the more chance remains of their locating us. As they have the ship, they are likely convinced we remain, and there is little reason to suspect they will lose interest in seeking us out.”

  “For that matter,” Cousins said, “reinforcements may arrive to aid in their search. For now, they number perhaps twenty or so. In a few hours, there could be sandmen crawling over these ruins. It would be quite nearly an impossibility to fight our way through those numbers.”

  The others agreed.

  “If there’s only twenty,” Rom grinned, “then I say we take them.”

  Cousins held up a hand. “There is still the problem of the ship. Should things go…awry…in the fight, we need to have an escape plan. Kari?”

  “Yes?”

  “How long do you think it would take you to repair the craft and get it up in the air?”

  Kari frowned again. “If they cut open the balloons, then I don’t know. I’ve got the tools to repair the material, but it all depends on how big the holes are. Maybe an hour, maybe two. And then another hour to fill the bags and be light enough to fly.”

  Favo shrugged. “After two or three hours, I’m certain the fight would be long since over,” he stated. “Regardless of who wins.”

  Wrinkling up his forehead, Cousins shook his head. “Wait a moment,” he whispered, turning and looking down over the ramparts. “Yes, that’s a curiosity,” he said.

  “What is?” Favo asked, crawling over to look down as well.

  “Look down there. What’s missing?”

  It took Favo a moment, but then he chuckled in appreciative understanding. “Ah, yes. That’s a mystery, isn’t it?”

  The two men turned back and sat before the two girls and Mulligan. “Oh, don’t look so content with yourselves,” the latter chided. “What is it?”

  Pointing a thumb back over his shoulder, Cousins smirked. “How long did it take us to get here? And then, only a few hours later, they arrive? There’s only our ship down in the courtyard. So how did the sandmen get here? Where’s their vehicle?”

  “Victory favors the informed,” Favo mused. “One of us needs to go take a look around, size up our foes. See what they’re hiding.”

  Cousins shook his head. “There’s too many of them,” he contended. “I don’t think any of us could manage it without being caught.”

  Rom smiled. “I know just the person for the job,” she said. “Well, not person, exactly.”

  Mulligan’s eyes widened. “No, Rom, you don’t mean me, do you? This isn’t my kind of task at all!”

  But she shook her head. “Not you,” she said consolingly. She lifted a hand to the gems of her forehead. “And not Terenaa or Yu, either. We need someone sneaky.”

  Mulligan hid his face in his paws. “Oh, no. Not him.”

  Chapter 27: Look Deeper

  Rickets rolled his eyes for the second time in as many minutes. “So explain it to me again. What exactly am I supposed to be looking for?”

  Cousins held back the momentary desire to smack the irritating beast. “I’m not sure. Another ship, perhaps; anything to tell us how these people got here so soon after we did. But be careful, I would assume they’d leave a few men behind to protect their way home.”

  Favo nodded. “Very likely, yes.”

  His eyes shifting from a cool pale yellow to an annoyed orange, Rickets’ face whiskers flicked in an additional indicator to his mood. “So, I’m to climb a hundred meters down and crawl past a dozen people…” he began, but Rom interrupted him.

  “Sandmen,” she corrected.

  “Past a dozen sandmen,” he repeated, surprising them all with how much emphasis the small creature could apply to his words, “and out into a place I’ve never been, searching for something you can’t even describe, all the while trying to avoid being killed by things several times larger and stronger than I am. Does that cover it?”

  Rom nodded thoughtfully. “Definitely try not to get caught,” she said helpfully.

  “I suppose I can try to be careful, since you insist.” he said sarcasm dripping from his words like venom. The fur on his long tail shimmered, then shifted in color to match the sandy textures of the stone beneath him, the full camouflaging effect expanding to cover his entire body until only a glimmering pair of eyes remained unchanged.
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br />   As he walked to the lip of the balcony, the colors of his fur shifted and took on the colors and lines and shadows from whatever was below or behind him, making him essentially invisible but for a momentary distortion of light. But when he stood still, he was almost entirely imperceptible.

  With a soft sigh, he dropped over the edge and disappeared from sight.

  Cousins and Mulligan looked skeptically at Rom. The former asked, “You’re sure about him?”

  Rom nodded again. “You can’t always trust what you see,” she said. “Sometimes, you have to look deeper.”

  Crawling along the rough stone surface was a simple enough feat for Rickets. He’d been managing his way along through the old sewers since he’d been a pup, and the slick surfaces of the pipe corridors and access tunnels were far slicker than this. His toes and footpads were made for climbing along treacherous spaces, and his bones were light and mostly cartilage, meaning that even when he did fall (which was rare, he said to himself without hint of hyperbole), he never suffered any lasting damage.

  The trouble was that, like all of his kind – even the ones of this generation which only possessed a rudimentary intelligence – he was far more inclined to use his natural skills to evade and avoid potential predators, not nance about on his way to within earshot of them. No fear of death is worth this, he said to himself, and not for the first time.

  He dropped quietly down the last wall, a good ways off from the patrolling sandmen. They were definitely looking for something, he observed, but he moved as quickly as he dared back along the paved stone road and away from the greater numbers of them. Two more of the “sandmen” (as the humans called them) stood sentry beside the ship-thing they’d come here in. Rickets was glad Rom hadn’t brought him out when they were up in the air in that…thing. “The gods made us close to the ground for a reason,” as his kind said. “Better to spend a life looking up at the sky than an instant looking down at the stones.” Awakening through Rom had brought back his species’ genetic potential, opening his mind to their collected memories, but the idea of it was still colliding with the basic needs for food and safety. His fur shivered at the thought, and he had to turn his mind away from it to focus on keeping the colors patterned on the follicles.

  The real trouble with humans, Rickets mused, was that they didn’t understand their own world. Here they were, making war with themselves again because of a difference of perspective. His nose wrinkled as it caught the scent of one of the white-clad sandmen. They smelled worse than death to his sensitive perceptions: they smelled corrupted, foul. Like death gone horribly wrong, and kept well past its due. Rickets paused to smell himself, suddenly curious. His ears flicked in an indication of reassurance. Whatever it was that the white-haired girl had done, at least he didn’t smell like that. In fact, he smelled like a kind of alive he wasn’t used to. The annoying one – Mulligan – smelled the same way, as did Terenaa, the fast one that had helped Rom catch him in the first place. They weren’t dead, but they weren’t quite alive, and yet… it felt right, somehow.

  More disconcerting to him was that she seemed to see through him – like she knew things about him he hadn’t divulged. His kind had many secrets, even though the humans living in the city treated them like vermin. Such as the memory they passed down by blood, for example. It was how he remembered the ways they had killed his kind as pests, tried to drive them out of the city, and the ways in which his own ancestors had survived. It was how he remembered the war which had broken the city, so many hundreds of years before, all because of the Reapers and their….

  His thought trailed off, and he stopped for a moment, looking back over his shoulder at the terrace where Rom and her friends awaited him. A soft inhalation of understanding filled his tiny lungs. Now I know what you are, he thought. This makes everything so much more…interesting.

  Turning back around, he nearly ran into a white leather boot, but veered away at the last second. There were two of them, just past the end of the stone road leading to the temple. Another four were a ways off and to the left, well out of sight from the temple itself. One was dumping a large bucket of meat onto the ground, at the far mouth of the canyon opening. The other three were standing beside the canyon wall, with a large and flat space of bare rock between them. These sandmen are very strange, Rickets thought. They feed and protect the rocks like they were their pets.

  A low rumble shuddered through the ground beneath his feet, sending another shiver across his fur. He lifted his nose and smelled, letting the longer whiskers of his cheeks take in what they could. His eyes snapped open. No, it can’t be. They haven’t been seen in years…but… He took another breath to confirm his suspicions, and felt his heart nearly skip a beat.

  He turned and ran back to Rom, as fast as his feet could take him.

  * * * * *

  It was a shivering and sweating Rickets that crawled back over the lip of the terrace to find Rom. His camouflaging was only marginally active, the remainder of his will having been spent at ensuring a successful climb to the top of the building where they sat, waiting.

  It took him several tries before he managed to speak. “No ship,” he said. “But they’re watching a spot of wall – maybe it’s a door…and…and…” he stammered, still breathless.

  Cousins and Favo exchanged a look. “If they have a concealed tunnel or some such leading out here, that would explain how they were able to surprise us,” Favo suggested.

  The younger man agreed. “And they could be sending additional troops even now and we would be none the wiser.”

  “What else is it, Rickets?” Rom asked, stroking the soft fur of his back. “You’re scared of something.”

  He nodded. “It’s a… it’s a….” he swallowed, summoning his strength, “a Xanos. That’s what it’s called. Big, full of teeth, not very pleasant.”

  Mulligan’s whiskers flickered anxiously. “A what?”

  Cousins felt his stomach flutter. “That enormous snake-lizard creature we saw on our way here?” He turned back to Rickets, and described the creature they’d avoided on their flight.

  Rickets confirmed it, “I thought they’d died out a long time ago, but…” He looked back at Rom. “I need to rest,” he lied, hoping Rom believed him.

  Whether she did or not she nodded slightly, touching one of the purple gems and sending him back to the realm of spirits. Her eyes rested on Mully, who was looking at her suspiciously.

  “A Xanos isn’t real, it’s a myth! They call them death-wyrms, ophidians or Reaper Tails.” Mulligan explained. “But they aren’t supposed to be real.”

  Favo glanced at Rom. “You have a tail?” he asked her.

  With a snort, Mulligan flicked his tail in Favo’s general direction. “Memory gave me all the experiences of all the Sheharids as far back as she can remember, and none of them have ever seen one of these…” he said, letting his voice trail off. “But I suppose it could be possible. But how exactly does that…does he,” he corrected himself, seeing Rom’s expression change, “know about something I don’t know?”

  She scratched the fur between his horns and lifted him onto her shoulder. “Like I said, you need to look deeper.”

  Favo sized her up, sighing in agreement. “Very well. You have a plan, then?” he asked.

  Rom merely grinned. “Like always,” she said.

  “Meaning, you don’t have a plan,” Cousins clarified with a soft groan.

  “It’s simple,” Rom explained. “If that xanos is coming, we need to get out of here. That means we have to go beat those sandmen up, while Kari fixes the airship.”

  Cousins shook his head. “It’s too dangerous. I don’t want her down there in the middle of whatever chaos I can only assume is going to erupt.”

  “I’ll be fine,” the smith said, “but someone should stay near me while I’m fixing the ship. I can’t pay attention to all of that fighting when I’m working. Besides,” she added, “none of you can repair it.”

  Cousins relu
ctantly conceded the point, though he seemed none too happy about the idea.

  Another touch to Rom’s gem summoned Terenaa and Yu, who stood a good bit back from the front of the terrace for concealment. Rom carried Terenaa in her arms, while the others climbed onto Yu’s great back.

  “We’ll come in around the side here to the left,” Favo gestured with his head while checking his two pistols. “You should drop straightaway to the soldiers at the doors and keep them occupied. We’ll secure the ship and give Kari what time she requires to get to work.”

  She nodded, looking briefly to all her friends’ faces. “I’ll go first,” she said decisively. No sooner had they nodded in agreement than she leaped from the ramparts, Mulligan hurrying to fly along behind her. Rom took a single stride for each level, tossing Terenaa up and outwards as she passed the last one, giving the smaller creature an opportunity to run along the side of the final wall at her own speed as Rom shot past. One of the sandmen looked up just as Rom landed atop his partner, covering the area in a small explosion of sand and dust. She called the Shepherd’s crook as a large sword and brought it around in a swift arc that rent him asunder in a secondary puff of ash.

  She leaped back in a quick flip, looking through the doors into the courtyard statuary. He heart sunk as at least twenty more of the sandmen took immediate notice of her and ran in her direction.

  “Hmm,” was all she said.

  Chapter 28: The First Casualties of Battle

  Yu extended his wings fully as they approached the ground, somehow managing to keep both wingtips from grazing the nearby cliff face and stone wall. A few trees passed swiftly by as they leveled out and closed in on the airship. The guards that had been milling about there were moving in on Rom, where they could see her already surrounded by many more sandmen than they had anticipated.