Captain Albion Clemens and The Future that Never Was: A Steampunk Novel! (Lands Beyond Book 1)

by Kin Law

  Perhaps some of the climate had been preserved when the place had been stolen, but Rosa fancied there was a line of mist separating the nest of Big Ben from its moorings. She hoped Cid had been right, that they would float gently to Earth like Mordemere intended.

  Meanwhile, the horde was still coming, jumping the gap and falling when they failed. They were quickly filling the catwalks with a grimy fury, like typhoon sewage into the streets. Rosa got up from where she had fallen, and ran once more. They were getting far too close for her comfort, and now she was near enough to make out similar hordes from the other separating landmarks. She found herself surrounded by drifting islands in the ocean of sky.

  Dimly, Rosa’s helmswoman sense of steam workings let her spot the arrangement of valves, wheels, and other machinery running alongside. She began to reach out, tripping this fixture and that lever, releasing scalding hot vapor in plumes.

  It made the horde rear back in pain, but like any good mob, they simply trampled their scorched fellows beneath mismatched feet and kept on coming.

  The steam seemed to make the smell worse. She would have to find some structure to hide in, but hadn’t they released all of those into the sky?

  She realized now there had never been any choice in the matter. If she had stayed to pilot Westminster in some attempt to help Albion, she would have been overrun by these creatures, torn limb from limb. She would have to have faith in her Captain, and look out for herself. Being a pirate now meant what it usually did: survival.

  There was only one place to run: deeper into the center of the Nidhogg, where Jonah Moore had hidden his guilty Core.

  14: Repentance

  In the aftermath of Moore’s last bullet, Albion was left huddled on the ground, clutching his Red Special in shock. Victoria lay loyally near his left hand, heavy with six slugs. It had been a gift from Captain Samuel.

  What had he done? The fact he had expended all of Jonah Moore’s crystals did not fully register with him yet. He couldn’t get the image of the Clanker who held a weapon to Elric Blair’s head, and how the Red had torn the man limb from metal limb. All that had been left was a greasy red blot on the stones.

  It had been a mistake. Albion was caught up in the firefight, slipping, dodging. He had a faint thought of trying to get close enough to deck the old codger, make him see sense. Albion, perhaps, reached too far into his bag of tricks, and tumbled headlong into cover. Scrabbling for his weapons, he recovered the wrong one. When his fumbling fingers registered the weight of the Red Special, the index had already pulled the trigger.

  Albion got up, slowly. He shivered at the cold seeping through his vest, the buttons blistering the skin at a touch. The mist hadn’t yet cleared from the spot where Captain Samuel had been standing. Albion suddenly wished it never would.

  “Gah…” Albion moaned. His leg struck something as he had been thrown backward, and now he was having trouble walking. It was an ominous sign.

  He could hear something stirring not too far from the Red Square, probably in the other monuments nearby.

  It was a mechanical whirring, a steamy hiss probably indicative of his crew at work. There was also a rustling, clinking sound faint on the wind: Clankers? It meant he did not have much time.

  The mist cleared. There was no grease spot. There wasn’t even a body. A long streak of charred pavement led to a hole in Vasily’s Cathedral, exposing an ornate chapel within. Beside the streak was only a rucksack, partially opened. Inside lay a package wrapped in some dirty rags. Albion hobbled his way over, looking around for signs of Captain Samuel. There were none.

  “Just like you, to run when you’re outmatched. I had to learn it from someone…” Albion muttered. Although, he reflected, Albion couldn’t actually remember the last time he had done so. He always wanted to, but he hadn’t, not even from Inspector Hargreaves’ insistence on this hare-brained quest. Somewhere deep inside he had parted from his adopted father’s pattern, and struck out on his own. He might be a pirate, but it was good to know he was also his own man.

  He had never aimed to kill, Albion knew, not through the whole firefight. Neither had Captain Samuel. Rosa would have sighed at the senselessness of it.

  Albion picked up the rucksack, and took out the package. Inside, of course, was a foot-long sliver of what looked to be a very pale amethyst. There was also a box of cigars, a flat glass bottle, and some other bits and bobs Albion couldn’t be bothered to look at. He took a swig out of the bottle, and the taste of wood-aged bourbon hit him as hard in the memories as it did his liver. At least he was warmer.

  He took a hard look now, at the spire not too far in the distance. The bridge out of the square wasn’t too far away. Even on his complaining knee, Albion could make it easily. He wondered about his crew; would he find them there, in the Nidhogg, finishing the job, or had they already abandoned him when they saw him fighting Captain Sam?

  He realized he had spent months with Blair and Hargreaves, longer with Rosa, and he couldn’t really tell what they would do.

  Everything seemed much clearer now, and though Albion Clemens knew why, he didn’t want to put it into words. It was enough he knew, that was all.

  He reached the bridge. The gantries all about him were humming with activity, bolts rising slowly out of mountings, pistons suddenly popping from their seats. It was the ship preparing to release Red Square back over Europe. Albion hobbled over the heavy-duty seals between the gantries, and sat down on a pylon to watch the Square fall away before his feet.

  The man with the strange wooden shoes was waiting not too far away. Albion barely even noticed before he was knocked down, and the rucksack taken from him. His enemy was moving slowly, and he wasn’t carrying any weapons. The flamboyant robes were torn and burned, and the hand rummaging in the sack looked like it was in some kind of black glove. Then the man in the broken mask had the Leviathan crystal in his hand.

  “Hell,” said Clemens. “You can have it. It will save me the trouble of carrying it with me to Mordemere, to stick it up his corn hole. Just leave the bourbon.”

  Wood Shoes looked about to argue, but decided against it. He took the gift horse and bounded away sprightly, though through the cracked demon’s mask it looked like he was in some considerable pain. Albion noted the face was an Oriental, like himself.

  Albion got up, still mourning his lost coat, and threw on the rucksack again.

  There was an airman’s jacket in there, with a fur lining, still smelling of cigar smoke and cheap cologne. It hit him mid-abdomen. A little warmer, Albion hobbled the last lengths of catwalks, emerging onto the landing of the spire. He heard a sort of caterwauling through the mist, as of a lynch mob scenting blood, but he couldn’t help his crew now. There was an open gate right before him, and inside, a spiraling stair.

  “I hate bloody stairs,” Albion said, but he began to climb them anyway. Thankfully, they went up only a little way before terminating at a row of closets. It was an elevator, Albion knew, from the gated walls and the cables visibly attached to the pulley on top. They were rare enough even in the more prosperous buildings, in the great cities of the world. He hoped Mordemere had not booby-trapped it somehow. There was one gate closed, and a closet missing, presumably already ascending towards Mordemere.

  Albion got in, and yanked the gilded lever towards the up direction. Everything was labeled clearly, and when the elevator began to move, it did so silently, without a puff of steam or other sign of an engine.

  The floors drifted past the gate one by one. Albion caught sight of elaborate laboratories, shining with apparatus. There were lavish libraries, filled with oiled leather tomes, and heartrendingly beautiful parlors filled with comfortable chairs and bar nooks. It was an unending parade of things Mordemere possessed, yet the fact the ship existed all around them meant the alchemist was unsatisfied with such paltry trappings.

  Give greed a face, and it would be the man who wished to live forever.

  Albion slunk down on the floor of the elev
ator. He wasn’t particularly tired, or depressed. It was a conscious decision. He would wait, and rest, and when the elevator reached Valima Mordemere, he would be ready to do what needed to be done, with what remained to him: six faithful slugs, sitting pretty in Victoria’s cylinder.

  15: The Worm

  In the face of an unending tide of monstrosities, we nearly collided into one another escaping in the same direction. We didn’t waste any time, heading right into the spire’s open portal, an arch of what looked like dull lead carved in strange runes. Even I did not know from what tradition they hailed.

  Ammunition gone, knives spent, we despaired of going back the way we had come. Even Elric Blair’s photogrammer was out of exposures. The way back was blocked by a vast, coursing river of air. It gaped between the various landmarks freed from the yoke of the Nidhogg’s metal tentacles. Her emptied, ruined gantries hung across the void, taunting us with bridges to nowhere. Only a thousand-foot drop into Eastern European sky awaited those who dared pay the toll.

  I turned back, once, hearing my hair whip across Blair’s long-suffering face. My gorge rose at the glimpse of bluish limbs studded with tubes, joints sliding on milled grooves instead of tendons. I couldn’t help but trace the pressure points, the rivers of nerves where I might have put some stupefying needle, surely to be thwarted by plates leaking an old, red putrescence.

  Vanessa Hargreaves loped down the corridors at my side. Her scorched pencil skirt made me wince momentarily. Were my skirts as ripped and bedraggled, as coated in blood and machine grease? Steam was good for cleaning, but I knew this bodice would never be gorgeous again. I would dig up these tights and find them stinking of this place. The Nidhogg bled a rank miasma, venting steam purple with the smell of something unclean.

  Blair was having the worst of it, carrying Cezette Louissaint, who seemed to have curled up into his arms, shivering.

  In the end, there was nowhere else to go but down, down and deep into the Nidhogg until we reached a smelted door. We had no choice but to tumble through, barring it as best we could behind us. Ill-lit schematics showed we were in the center of the ship. We needed to find Albion, find the Core, and destroy it, before Mordemere got his hands on the crystal and reached the Laputian Leviathan. With the full intention of carrying out our ill-conceived mission, we turned to behold a terrible sight.

  “By Queen and Country…” Hargreaves’ labored wheeze was the first sign of something wrong. She had been wearing appropriated headgear, polarized against the light, and whipping it off, was already adjusted to the relative gloom. She was the first to see beyond the portal.

  It was dark, deep inside the ship, and the pervasive smell was stronger than ever. Rotted meat, raw sewage or simple garbage could not account for the rancid egg stench.

  In the blackness, it was one of those scents all the more nauseating for its mystery. A nose kept sniffing at it, trying to figure out what all the familiar components were, while becoming increasingly sick from it. Slowly, my eyes adjusted, and I immediately wished they had remained blind forever.

  White. Blindng, maggot-white filled the chamber, occasionally interposed by the glossy grease-black of machinery. At first I thought I was looking at some enormous worm, grown huge on the feed of Mordemere’s conquered. Pinkish growths poked out of the mass at intervals, like the stubby legs of some monstrous larvae, each one grasping and reaching unceasingly.

  They writhed, they struggled, and the whole mass presented itself against the center of the room, braced against smaller columns holding up the ceiling. Occasionally one lump brushed grease clean from the chains, gleaming gold beneath. My eyes adjusted more, and I gasped, for I had glimpsed the unmistakable configuration of brown eyes, perched alarmingly over some gross, pink swell of flesh.

  “The worm that gnaws at the roots of the tree of life…” Blair murmured, then began to wretch in a corner. Hargreaves took Cezette for a moment, obligingly. None of us could smell the sick coming out of Blair. The horrible stink of what lay before us blew away anything a healthy person could dredge up. It heaved itself at us in waves, as if a massive, rotted bellows was churning the stagnant air into hot, thick soup. No, not a bellows, lungs, great and meaty and riddled with consumption.

  “Clemens said… Oh God, Cid said aeons react to emotions. Peoples’ emotions…” Hargreaves managed, though she could wrench her eyes from the sight. Cezette was visibly shivering, her face buried in the linen of Hargreaves’ bosom.

  With a wrenching pop, something fell from the mass of flesh wrapped round the core of the Nidhogg. It landed with a splat, scrabbling and writhing onto the grating. It had two arms and two legs, but the thing wasn’t a person anymore. It drooled, it bled from every pore in its skin, and it reached out as if for some small morsel of food or human warmth. I started to put one high-heeled boot towards it, but it recoiled, as if in horror, at even the kindness of a warm hand. After watching its eyes darting around, I realized what it was after- the touch of the chains, once again.

  In the end it simply collapsed, and lay still.

  The look on its face was one of agonized rapture, as if it had, paradoxically, spent all its life fighting free of the mass beside it, only to die in the attempt.

  With a squelch, another something fell out of the mass on the other side, landing with another splat. It was brown. What I had taken for dark machinery was not only gears and cogs. This close, the susurrus of moaning just beneath all the steamwork was hard to bear.

  “We destroy it,” I heard myself say. “We find Albion, and we-“

  “We can’t,” the Inspector said. “Blair was facing death, and Clemens used the a Moore crystal to save him. We all heard him use the last one on Captain Samuel.”

  “It’s a machine! We’ll throw a wrench into the gears!” I yelled, furious. This Core, this thing that Jonah Moore had helped build, it was monstrous. The sheer wrongness of it seemed to defy reality. It could not exist any longer, but there it squatted, holding up the ship, nourishing itself on the lives of everyone in its body. I suddenly remembered all the missing persons’ posters, plastered on the streets of Leyland.

  “I suspect our involvement will no longer be necessary,” Elric Blair’s voice cut through. “Do you hear? This horrible thing is coming apart at the seams. It’s going to collapse at any moment!”

  Indeed, this great worm was shedding its ghoulish components to the faint grind of misaligned machinery. My fine helmswoman’s senses told me this ship was deeply sick, in its death throes- unless, my intuition suggested, the Leviathan crystal was used.

  “But we have no guarantee-!” I began.

  “We do,” Hargreaves said, and when I looked at her I almost wretched. She was touching the Core! Her bare fingers were resting on a bulge of flesh near us. It was dewed with sweat. Cezette had been set on the floor, in a fetal position. The caps of her missing legs gleamed alarmingly.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I yelled. I hurried to pick up Cezette again, off the fetid-smelling grating. “Get away from it!”

  “No,” Hargreaves said. Her eyes were unfocused in the dim light, dilated to black circles rimmed in blue. “These people… they’ve been here so long, they’ve forgotten who they were. They’ve forgotten their dreams, their hopes, friends, lovers… They only know suffering.”

  “It’s the great secret of this place, you see… the Core yearns for memories. The yearning draws the memories in the monuments near, right into the sky. This one, here,” Hargreaves touched a mass of ruddy flesh barely recognizable as a person. “This used to be Maddie McCreedy… she once saw the Eiffel Tower in a book, and dreamed of meeting her paramour on the observation deck. There, that brownish lump, that used to be a steel worker named Robert. He always wanted to go to Big Ben, and climb it when nobody was looking. Over here, this used to be Esteban Dio, Templar Champion, in exile from his home in Barcelona. He used to sit in the Vatican, the last bastion of his faith, and play chess with a friend who had never heard of the Bi
ble. They can’t go any more, so they’re pulling the places closer instead.”

  Hargreaves laughed, quite suddenly, and a moment later started tearing up.

  “Snap out of it!” I cried, and delivered one of my patented roundhouse slaps. It was one tailor-made for Nessie Drake’s temper tantrums.

  As my hand made contact, I got a flash of something- images, feelings, a smell I couldn’t place.

  Then it was gone, and I found my face wet. Elric Blair was standing over us, holding the Inspector back.

  “Are you all right?” Blair asked, reluctant to let go.

  “Yes… yes, thank you,” the Inspector said, after a moment. “We should find the Captain… we need to leave.”

  “Agreed,” I said emphatically. “Fuck this place.”

  16: Future that Never Was

  To Albion’s surprise, the tower he emerged into was already filled with the scintillating brilliance of the Laputian Leviathan. The shades of cerulean, azure and lapis streaming in through the French doors could not be mistaken for anything else.

  Albion had felt his ears pop as he rode up on the elevator. The air was difficult to breathe. They must have risen over the cloud cover, or ridden out of whatever dread mist Mordemere’s contraption created, for the Leviathan’s light lanced through in neat, ordered rows. He looked outside, and immediately regretted it- the shimmering galleries and halls hanging in midair seemed nearly real, like he could step outside the porthole and stand on a city in the sky.

  He had to hurry.

  The Nidhogg was, understandably, unlike any airship Albion had ever flown, hijacked or threatened. The elevator opened onto an anteroom. It was laid in a ring right round the edge of the spire, like an enclosed tower battlement. Albion dragged muddy boots across the lush carpeting, staggering past an astonishing array of artifacts. Plush Chesterfields and Victorian brocade sofas reclined near walls full of ancient tomes gleaming with patina. Exotic plants stood in ancient China vases. Crystal learning cubes full of plant samples and insects sat neatly in a mahogany box on one shelf. Another held a series of anthropological artifacts, including a series of human skulls. Some were the size of Albion’s hands.