by Kin Law
He would give his right arm to have more of it, new tastes, new cultures, a new life.
The ship was called the Huckleberry, her Captain, Samuel Jebediah Clemens of Jackson, Missisippi. He was a proud man who wore a proud brown moustache, with a penchant for cigars and ‘Chester rifles. He spoke in a slow drawl, smelled of his sickening bottles and disliked children. It was hard to understand why his crew was so devoted to him, until they sailed over the remains of the Walled City. Captain Sam asked the boy, in halting Cantonese, which part of the massive phalanx of dwellings he called home. The boy pointed to a section of the City gutted and black, and the Captain merely grunted and said:
“That’s no place I’d leave even a dog. You’re coming with me, boy.”
Passage aboard the Berry was not free. The boy helped Auntie with her myriad shipboard tasks, followed Cid Tanner around running wrenches and loosing bolts. The Captain, in his spare time, taught him the rudiments of navigation, and shooting, and most importantly, what scraps of language he could. His days were long, and nights no less tiring than in the Walled City, but the boy was learning, and moving, and it made all the difference in the world.
It didn’t take the boy long to figure out Captain Sam was a pirate. The Walled City supplied many of the same type, and the boy had long ago learned crooks were not always untrustworthy. Sam, at least, was a crook who traveled, and all travelers are great lovers of books.
As soon as he had his English letters, the boy began attacking the Captain’s stash in the hold, a veritable mountain of literature.
Though he couldn’t always understand the people and places inside, they opened up a brand new vista, and so long as he was on the Berry, she promised to bring him to any of those places that lived in black and white on the page.
Flying from port to port, devouring what knowledge he could in his spare moments, the boy eventually built some understanding of his place in the world. Kowloon and Hong Kong culture was very different from even the Imperial Canton or the Commonwealth Republic.
It befuddled him when he discovered his ancestral brethren shared none of the practices he took for granted. The ruling British had influenced how he and his family behaved, from afternoon tea in the dank, greasy tearooms of the Kowloon Walled City to their everyday courtesies towards neighbors.
Those same mannerisms seemed to serve him better in a world mostly conquered by the Britons’ dirigible fleets. Besides, he was now picking up brand new habits from the motley crew of the Berry.
The name was no accident.
“Albion,” the boy said to the Captain one evening at the dinner table. The Captain looked up from cleaning his rifle, and grunted inquisitively.
“It’s what I’m calling myself,” Albion insisted, stabbing at his trout.
“Albion Clemens. I like it,” Sam grunted in reply, tossed back a dram of bourbon, and gone back to cleaning his gun. Albion never felt anything like he felt that moment, and never would again.
It wasn’t all gallivanting about and performing acts of daring villainy. Often the life of piracy involved sitting or sailing for long stretches, veritable deserts of monotony.
It was the perfect environs for reading, or playing chess with Cid, or learning how to perfectly poach eggs with Auntie. Yet, as Albion rushed about fulfilling his elders’ amused requests, he often looked towards the forecastle, where Captain Sam could be seen gazing forlornly out over the cloud ocean.
Between the hijackings and smugglings, the Captain of the Berry was a man to be reckoned with. He was a man of honor, no doubt about it. He never killed unless he needed to, preferring to give his foes a chance to cut their losses and save their necks. He beat Brown Bernard Hawkins, whose deadeye flintlock left Cid nearly dead and carrying a limp ever since, half to death with the butt of his ‘Chester. Sam’s face was ruddy with bourbon, but he had let Hawkins go, with enough provisions to reach land.
Saving lives was a costly habit, one Albion would later confer to his own crew. A pirate didn’t leave a foe alive to come kill him later. Albion himself took the brunt of Sam’s drunken wrath more than once, by sharp word or heavy fists. Albion never shook the feeling each time Captain Sam set a looted freighter crew loose, errant and vengeful, of the man making up for some past sin.
The breaking point came somewhere over the Australian outback. Captain Sam was mum over all his black moods, yet the mood gripping him one dry, baked run from Melbourne to a small outpost in aborigine territory left him tight-lipped and twitchy, prone to snapping at loud, sudden noises. The hold held nothing particularly gruesome, just a perfectly legal engine for heating and cleaning water, some medical supplies, and boxes of colorful trinkets for trade with the natives.
Albion was seventeen, had his air legs and was given charge of securing the hold.
Years of Auntie’s hale food and plying the saucy skies had stretched him out, packed on some hard cords of muscle and browned his skin. Yet, if a person could see a photogram of Albion at eleven and Albion at fourteen, they would recognize the look of hunted insecurity at once. Sam could take the boy out of the Walled City, but the Walled City had tunneled a rat’s nest inside the boy. He was still expecting the Syndicate men to come find him with their cleavers and melon knives, or worse yet, his true father to appear to drag him into the dank passages.
Even in the darkness of the Berry’s hold, the outback heat swept over Albion in waves. Delicate goods were usually packed in sawdust or barrels of water, leaving little need to insulate the hold itself. The engines churned gallons of steam into nourishing moisture, but Cid had imposed water rationing to ensure the Berry would not run dry somewhere in the ‘uncivilized backwater of the world.’ The two weeks they had already put in were a dry hell of no cold showers and just enough drink to keep a person alive. Sitting in the shafts of light slanting through slats in the bulkhead, Albion felt a little like a smoked fish.
“I know we’re delivering pickles. The settlers won’t miss a little brine off the top,” Albion desperately reasoned, and began climbing the interminable pile of sundry in search of something to splash on his neck. The pile was lashed down well, he had done it himself, but quite tall and packed together like a puzzle. The barrels of foodstuffs were at the top. When Albion reached them, he used a crowbar to pry open the lid, only to discover little jars of brown sick packed in sawdust, bone-dry.
“Branston pickle!” He made it a curse. It was actually one of his favorite foodstuffs, but the disappointment was a little much in the oven of a hold.
Albion did not know how close he had come to the new occupants in the hold, not until the voices began to ripple through. He could actually see the dust motes quiver a split second after he heard them.
“You are not truly going through with this?” Cid’s voice was the first to drift through.
“We’re doing this, and I won’t have ye bickering over the right of it, ye hear?”
Captain Sam’s words were like ice- it chilled the parched Albion to the bone.
“Think it over Sam. Don’t pretend for a second you aren’t thinking of the Kyushu Maru every living moment of the day. I see you perched on the deck, looking east as if you can bring them back out of the sun.”
“It was war, Cid. I did what my country needed- I sent those folks into the Lands Beyond to chart the way. They never reached home, and America stayed out of the Great War.”
“’Folks’ now? Not squint-eyes?” There was a pause. Cid continued. “You could have put them down on any old Pacific island, told the top brass anything you wanted. They would have believed you, Captain Samuel J. Clemens of the Ninety-First Eagles.”
“Do NOT call me that, ye old limey son of a whore,” Sam hollered. Cid took no notice.
“What you’re about to do is a great deal worse, do you understand? Those people had a chance. They might have been able to fly through the ball lightning, evaded the giant cormorants, blimey, even threaded the coral pillars and whatever else those god-forsaken lands hold.”
>
“No chance in hell-“
“But this time, you, Samuel J. Clemens, are about to knowingly commit genocide! You are going to kill people, Sam!”
“I did what I did because they ain’t people! My crew are people! They never was people!”
Sam’s hoarse voice cracked, something it had never, ever done. It was such a shock, Albion’s feet slipped from their perch atop a crate packed full of potatoes.
He had been listening intently, leaning forward, and now he tumbled over the edge and onto the boxes of glass trinkets, breaking open the top of one with an attractive clatter. The sound drew the pair of older men toward the pile of cargo, and it was hard enough comprehending their looks of horror, let alone what Captain Sam said next.
“You stay off of there, Albion!” The reprimand didn’t nearly reach Albion in time. As the youth struggled to get up, he kicked over one of the boxes of trinkets. The necklaces and bracelets rattled prettily enough, but when toppled, it was hard to miss both Uncle Cid and Captain Sam jumping agilely out of the way, as if the hard little pebbles were bits of flaming lava.
“Cover ye face! For God’s sake, cover ye face!” Sam’s voice cut through the patter of rolling marbles.
Albion did as he was told, automatically, slowly. His gaze was fixed on the thing hidden underneath the baubles, packed in sweet bundles of dry flowers to mask the scent. It had been done meticulously, but nothing could hide those mottled fingers, sticking up out of the rainbow of glass as if reaching for a body to pull into the grave.
Later, Cid explained it in a way a five-year-old could understand. The beads were for the natives, who hadn’t completely given over the land to the settlers. They were holding fast enough to their ways not to trade land for the settlers’ steam looms or photogram machines.
Albion had long ago read the treatise in Sam’s jumble of books, on the Indians of the American Northeast, who had perished from a European gift of blankets riddled with smallpox.
It seemed to Albion their Captain Samuel was just the type of man who was not afraid of using a proven military strategy- very Sun Tsu.
“It’s to be mutiny,” Auntie insisted. Her hair was still gold. “We have to try and convince him not to go through with the job.”
“It’s not mutiny if we’re saving him from himself,” Cid argued. Auntie’s was a lone voice, without Cockney Alex, but a charismatic one. The few others in the room were aeronauts for hire, passing through on a job, and cared little either way.
Albion sat in on the conversation, knowing his voice would be bulled over, hushed, count for nothing. It had been like this in the Walled City, when his blood father had made all the decisions for the family. A loud voice mattered more than a sound mind, was the lesson he taught Albion. It came as a surprise when Uncle Cid turned to Albion, and implored on him for his opinion.
“So the vote’s tied. We need someone to break the stalemate,” Cid said, shaking Albion out of his reverie. “One: we overpower Sam and lock him in the brig, dump those blasted glass beads into the outback to bake. He’s like to put up a fight, and he knows the ship inside and out. I wouldn’t put it past him to have some secret way of escape, and a stash of copper jackets. Two,” here, Cid took a deep, reluctant breath. “We go through with Sam’s plan, stay silent to the last. Without this job, the ship’s dead in the sky anyway. No fuel, no water, no money to escape the outback. What’s it to be, young Clemens?”
“Why me?” Albion’s voice came shaking and confused.
“Why? You bear his name. Of all of us, you’re the least likely to be killed,” Auntie said gently. “He loves you, kiddo.”
“He’ll kill me in an instant,” Albion argued. He was looking into one of Auntie’s teapots, hanging in her galley, seeing his yellow reflection. “You heard him. None of us are people, not to him. At best I was only a dog. An unimportant, little dog.”
“Lad, no,” Cid sighed. “Listen to me. You heard a conversation meant only for me. I’ve known Sam for years, lad. Those words? Hot air. The man’s dying from regret, he wants to convince himself so’s he’ll stop feeling guilty. If he believed it, he would have moved on long ago.”
“You mean he wants to pretend he didn’t kill those airmen, so he’ll kill some more?”
“Stop butchering my words, lad. He’s doing it for his crew, too. It’s slim pickings here in the outback, and more than likely the natives won’t accept the trinkets.”
“But what if they take the peace offering?” Auntie reproached. “Then the plague will take every last one of them. We have to have the Captain change his mind, or eventually he’ll do it again.”
“But what do I do? I don’t want to mutiny against the Captain! What if he kills one of us? What if we kill him?” The galley seemed to swim, and Albion realized he was about to cry. He, Albion Clemens, was about to cry in front of a gang of hardened pirates and airmen.
Cid and Auntie and everyone else looked at each other, but nobody had an answer coming. They were all clutching their arms nervously, Auntie a chef’s knife, Cid his massive wrench, the others with pistols and cutlasses.
They were as lost as he- and suddenly, the thought of those confident, cussing folks all turning to him for an answer shifted something inside Albion. Like a toggle being tripped, the boy who would be Albion was gone- and the Manchu Marauder was born.
“We do not have to mutiny, well, not really,” Albion said, haltingly at first, but gaining strength as he went. “If you would all help me… we might be able to do it. It wouldn’t be pretty, but like the Kyushu Maru… he would have a chance. We would all have a chance.”
“I’m listening, lad,” Cid said, and he was as good as his word, one ear turned intently towards Albion.
As they neared the outpost, Cid altered the navigational instruments slightly, just enough to change their heading by a few degrees. Albion knew how, after all, Sam had taught him well. Cid pretended to make peace with the Captain, reluctantly presenting him with a hundred-year old whiskey (“You blasted kid! I was saving it for… well, an emergency. Bloody logical, all you Chinese…”). The Captain’s weakness for whisky was legendary, and deep in moral quandary, he had no reason to suspect Cid Tanner. When he was passed out, the crew simply dumped him out the cargo hatch, with a bag of provisions. They would burn the accursed load of trinkets, saving what sundry seemed safe to consume. Hopefully, the crew would be able to gather fuel and water on Branston pickle alone.
Albion was the one who physically rolled the Captain out of the hold. Everyone else was too scared to do it, convinced Sam would bolt awake and shank the man who set boot on Sam’s back. They had the right of it- two inches from the edge, a drunken hand snaked out and latched on to the bulkhead.
“Why? What?” Sam said, clearly still inebriated.
“Because,” Albion answered, more lucid than he had ever been, “because we are people, not dogs. Because everyone deserves a chance to live different, even you.” And he kicked Captain Sam out of the Huckleberry.
13: Survive
Rosa Marija reached the control apparatus under Westminster when the explosion ripped through the air. Even across the metropolitan span of the Nidhogg, Rosa felt the iron tang of the Red Special. It seemed somehow magnified in the environs of Mordemere’s ship, like standing in a pond while someone belly-flopped into it.
“Albion…” Rosa murmured, knowing full well there wasn’t a soul to hear her. Suddenly she wished Cezette Louissaint were there, ready with some soothing clarity only available from those on the other side of puberty.
The helmswoman deftly completed the sequence necessary to separate the Houses of Parliament from the Nidhogg. Under her deft fingers and dirigible-savvy wit, it was a simple matter. What was harder was the temptation to abandon her comrades and assist her momentarily deranged Captain. It would be very easy to grasp the rudimentary controls before her and pilot the whole of Westminster over Red Square. At the very least, she would be able to distract the pirate Captains into halting t
heir gunfire.
Impulsive to a fault, Rosa hid a core of steadfast responsibility, ever since what happened with Nessie Drake. It was her fault Nessie’s heart had been broken. Rosa had chosen the company of airmen instead of watching over her friend.
Rosa checked her tiny pocket watch, in a rosette hung around her neck, and set the tab timer for the appropriate interval: two minutes. Then she stepped deftly out of the cabin and made for the ring of gantry catwalks separating Europe’s landmarks from the airship proper. She would help Blair and Hargreaves, and go to the Core.
As she emerged onto the surface, in sight of Big Ben and the wizard’s spire of the Nidhogg, she felt another change in the air around her. Even without her tarot deck, she might have guessed at the reading: Ten of Airs, an impending danger. Perhaps even Ragnarok, the calamity.
When the doors of the Abbey, not fifty yards from her, burst open, and a horde of hooded figures disgorged from its depths in an interminable flood, Rosa was only a little bit surprised.
“Oh my balls!” Rosa cried, before turning and running for life.
The catwalks weren’t very direct, taking right angles and winding detours, frustrating Rosa’s attempts to reach the spire. In another moment, she was glad of them. The horde was flooding into the gantries at such a pace, they tumbled over the tight turns and into the sky below.
When she scrambled through a turn, Rosa was able to look more closely: no, not Clankers, like she first thought. This wasn’t military order, they were just swarming blindly, perhaps sensing the impending change to their environs.
These things might have been Clankers at one point or another, but Rosa caught the look of blue ankles, limps, and uneven arms struggling to balance into an efficient run.
A scent of rotted flesh like bad eggs and sour meat drifted to her nose, along with a feeling of infinite despair.
Even as the thought occurred to her, the gantry beneath her feet gave a rumble, sort of settling on its pivots. Rosa turned and gaped; a gap was appearing between the gantries and the gaslit streets of Westminster. Massive pistons rose from their mounts, clamps unbuckled, locks unwound with whirring precision.
