by J. S. Morin
“Lookie there,” Tabby said, standing with her hand still mashed down on the paper, obscuring one of the side stories. “Got your flashpop in the papers.”
Below the headline, rendered in dingy shades of cheap ink, was a picture of an overturned trolley. It lay angled off the rails, with one side crushed beneath the bulk of the lower carriage. The image was grainy, but the puddle on the ground beside it looked like blood.
“Muffle it, Tabita,” Rynn warned. “You want the whole place knowing?” She remembered to use Tabby’s civic name in public.
Hayfield stroked his beard. “Rynn’s right. Bet the knockers are pretty sore about this one.”
“I’ll say,” Rynn commented. Her eyes were already scanning the article. “They got a reward out and everything.”
“How much?” Buckets asked. He stroked his face in imitation of Hayfield, but his own chin was still years from producing a proper beard.
“More than Pick’s gonna get from those gold coins we pinched, I bet,” Rynn replied.
She continued reading the story, eager to discover what Judicial Enforcement knew about her and her friends. The story said that there were eyewitness accounts of a band of a dozen armed humans who attacked a trolley. It had been carrying enforcement officers responding to reports of gang activity on layer three. The official reports claimed that dynamite was used to knock the trolley off the rails. Most of the story focused on the trolley, the injured and wounded officers, and the subsequent chase into the maintenance tunnels. Nowhere did it mention their initial crime: robbing a courier en route to the Gottgram Museum with a shipment of ancient human coins. Nowhere did it imply that one of the “dozen” suspects was female.
“How long ‘til Pick’s back?” Buckets asked, directing his question to Rascal.
Rascal shrugged, caught in the middle of a long pull at his tankard of mead. He finished and wiped his mouth with a sleeve.
“Dunno,” Rascal said. “Pickers knows his fences though, so he’ll get a price for ‘em. Might be he has to ride the thunderail a few stops to find someplace that hasn’t got buzzed about the theft yet. He could be gone a while. News like this, it’s probably across half of Ruttania by now.”
Rynn flipped the newspaper to read below the fold.
“Shit,” she swore softly.
“What’s that, Rynn?” Hayfield asked.
She pointed at the words as she read along from the article: “... and a strange sort of gun was found left at the scene. It has been sent to Klockwerk University for study.”
“Maybe you can pinch it back,” Buckets suggested. Rynn glared at him.
“I—” No-Boots said, “I wanted to make it a surprise.”
“Make what a surprise?” Rascal asked. His voice was sharpened by the mead in his belly, and honed by bad news.
No-Boots reached into the pocket of his coveralls and drew out a lump of metal.
“I was wearing good gloves, so it wasn’t so hot as I couldn’t rip the magic bit off your gun to save it for you.”
Rynn lunged past Buckets to throw an arm around No-Boots. She hugged him even as she reclaimed the runed dynamo from his hands.
Chapter 4
“I used to wonder why you taught me math instead of fairytales. It was so I could build my own.” -Madlin Errol
Steel panels littered the floor. The cabinets whose innards those panels exposed contained a tangle of wires, which ought to have belonged to the nest of some giant, copper bird. Loose ends dangled or dragged along the floor, while the other ends disappeared into terminals at the backs of the cabinets.
A lone human toiled away on the nightmare of every beginner spark student: turning those neat little sketches of circuits into a practical, working device. The human was in the latter half of middle-age, his face and scalp shaved bald. He squinted through spectacles at a table stacked with schematics; he twisted so that he could reference them as his arms were jammed to the elbows inside the spark machinery, sleeves rolled above the elbows. Satisfied that his latest adjustment was correct, he pulled a wrench from his tool belt and tightened the terminal he had just fitted in place.
A runed steel collar around his neck identified him as a slave named Erefan, who belonged to a daruu named Kezudkan. Erefan had been working all day on the wiring, which he had done the previous day as well, and seemingly every day. He had lost count of the days he spent building the power relays for the machine.
Bundles of wire ran from each cabinet, so thick that they had to be beaten with mallets to bend. At the other end, each wire ran to a giant coil. The coils were mounted around the periphery of a steel archway built on a dais at one end of the workshop.
“Erefan!” a voice shouted from across the workshop. It was a deep, rumbling sound that carried through the floor as well as through the air. Erefan turned to see his owner come through the door. “How does my machine fare this evening?” Kezudkan stood nearly Erefan’s height, but was nearly as wide as he was tall. The skin of the daruu had an aspect of bare rock, grey and irregular, devoid of hair, to which all Kezudkan’s people were attuned. Despite his elegant attire of red velvet and gold embroidery, his feet were bare to keep the feel of the stone against his flesh.
“Still skeptical of the wire gage,” Erefan answered. He turned back to his work as he addressed his master. “I’ve sketched up a thermal relay to open the circuit if it starts to overheat.”
“Bah,” Kezudkan replied. “I just want to get the viewfinder up and running. I don’t expect to run it to full power on the first try.”
“Hey, if you want it done any faster, grab a wrench and pitch in,” Erefan snapped. Rather than take offense, the daruu just chuckled.
“You know I would, Erefan,” said Kezudkan. “I’m just no good with those little wires. You’ve got too many in too small a space for my fingers to fit. You have no one to blame but yourself for the design.” Kezudkan held up his hands as evidence to back his claim. Each finger was nearly the thickness of Erefan’s forearm. Erefan turned to see, gave a grunt in reply, and went back to tightening wire terminals.
Kezudkan was wealthy, even by daruu standards. His estate was on the outskirts of Eversall Deep, reachable only by private tunnel, and spanned three whole layers. The workshop was just a tiny portion, tucked in the belly of the estate.
“If you aren’t here to help... tomorrow morning at the earliest.” Erefan stepped away from the cabinet and walked to the tiny kitchen area. He poured himself a cup of tea from a kettle long since gone cold.
“I’d like to have a look at the original schematics, and compare them against what you’ve built thus far,” Kezudkan said. He followed Erefan and took a seat at the circular table by the stove. There were two chairs, and the daruu took the one that was three times the width of the other, with a solid stone base. He eased his bulk into the unpadded seat, and squirmed about to settle in.
Erefan paused a moment. He took a sip of his cold, unsweetened tea with a thoughtful, distant look on his face.
“Tomorrow evening, then. And that’s if you don’t dawdle over them.”
Kezudkan shook his head. “Erefan, you are the only slave I know of who gets away with talking to his owner thusly.”
“Only because you can’t build that thing without my help.”
“Oh? You think so?” Kezudkan asked. He raised a craggy, hairless brow. “I may not take such pleasure in the grimy wrench-work that you seem so enamored of, but I could construct the machine by myself if I had to—after a few modifications to the design.”
“Listen, after I get the wiring done, we can try out the viewer. As long as we leave it at that, we shouldn’t overload the system—I think. Without being able to read the manual, we can’t be sure without trying. But if you want it done by morning, just leave me in peace to work on it.”
“Fine, Erefan, fine,” Kezudkan waved his hand in mock defeat. He stood, levering himself out of the chair with effort. Erefan had been owned by Kezudkan for years, but knew little enough ab
out daruu physiology that he could not tell if his master was infirm, or if the stiffness of his movements was endemic to his people. “I’ll send Mifa down with some dinner for you. You know, I’d have sent you out on stipend years ago if I thought you’d remember to feed yourself.”
Erefan sneered. Being reminded that—on a whim—Kezudkan could let him live out in the city on a small stipend to take care of his needs, had always irritated him. Few slaves were less likely to run away than him. Few were better suited to managing their own affairs. On Tellurak, his twin commanded the largest private firm in the world. He knew the real reason he was denied that hint of freedom.
“You couldn’t bring yourself to lose all the nights I work.”
“True enough,” Kezudkan admitted. “But you can’t bring yourself to stop doing it, even knowing that’s all that keeps you here. That’s what I like best about you. You want to see the machine work worse than I do, I think. It drives you. I mean, all it would take is a word to Slave Welfare that I work you twenty hours a day, and I’d be up on fines. But you don’t want them to stop you, either.”
Erefan downed the last of his tea in one gulp. The bitter felt good going down. It was still sweeter than anything Kezudkan was telling him.
“You want me back to work, or not?” Erefan asked.
Kezudkan raised a finger to his temple in a flippant salute, and turned to leave. As he ambled over to the door, he bellowed, “Don’t mind me. I just own the place.”
Erefan tried to get back to work. He got as far as checking his blueprints and sticking his head back into the mass of wires still to be connected. He couldn’t bring himself to make any new connections. Kezudkan’s words still echoed too clearly in his thoughts.
It wasn’t the idea of him being captive to his own drive and ambition that distracted him. Much as that galled him, it was an old and scarred wound that the old daruu had inflicted on him years ago. Rather, the suggestion that the wiring might not be right was gnawing at him. While he had dissuaded Kezudkan from performing the inspection, he knew he would not hush the nagging in his mind until he had checked for himself.
There was a bookshelf in the workshop, which was covered with glass-paneled doors, and under lock and key. Tiny runes etched in the surface of the glass made the panels harder than steel. The bookshelf was as secure as a vault. A chain hung from Erefan’s slave collar, disappearing under the fabric of his shirt. He pulled on it and withdrew a key. There were only two copies of the key as far as Erefan knew. Kezudkan had the other one.
Erefan unlocked the cabinet and scanned the spines of the books. They all bore kuduk runes (Erefan knew they were really daruu runes, but knew better than to let on in front of any kuduk), but the words they formed were gibberish. He knew the one he was looking for by familiarity, not by knowing the title. It was white, with gold leafing in the runes.
As with every time he handled these mysterious books, he marveled at their lightness. The cover of this one was like leather, but was not. The pages bore striking similarities to paper, but it was no paper Erefan knew of. Kezudkan had acquired them years ago, and they had tried a number of tests to determine the nature of the materials. The cover resisted blades and heat, though they could not bring themselves to test either form of damage exhaustively—Eziel forefend if firing a bullet at it or throwing it in a furnace would work! The pages took neither ink, nor chalk, not pencil; all wiped right off. Nor would the pages take a crease. The paper-like material was pure white, with crisp, clear runes interspersed with diagrams, schematics, and pictures.
Before Erefan could settle down to read through the schematics the book contained, there was a knock at the door.
“Come in!” he shouted down the length of the workshop.
The door opened. “Excuse me, Mr. Erefan,” Mifa said, raising her voice to be heard as she made her way down to his end of the room. “The master told me to bring you some dinner.” She was carrying a silver platter with a cover over it.
That’s not all he told you to bring me, was it?
“Set it down on the table,” Erefan replied. He occupied a unique niche in the household. Kezudkan’s obvious preferential treatment—not just limited to the liberties he was allowed in speaking with the master—set him above the rest of the human slaves. He was Kezudkan’s “pet tinker.”
Mifa did as she was told. She set the platter down, then stood next to it with her hands clasped in front of her like she was waiting for it to be judged. Erefan sighed. She was too young to know any subtlety about it, but Erefan had seen worse attempts. She stood there with an expectant little smile on her face, watching him. She kept her posture straight, her chin held high, showing off the polished brightsteel of her collar and the bodice of her dress. It was the outfit she wore that was the surest sign that Kezudkan had sent her down for more than a meal; the thin fabric clung tight against her skin, not warm enough for the chill that pervaded the estate.
He thinks we’re just animals, to rut when the chance presents itself. Erefan knew it worked on other slaves well enough, but he refused to let it happen to him, much as he suspected he might enjoy it.
“Go on. I’ll eat when I get hungry,” Erefan told her. He turned to go back to his work, but heard her clear her throat. It wasn’t the coincidental sort of throat clearing, but the sort that was meant to draw attention. He looked back.
“Master told me to stay and make sure you ate. Said you ain’t no good to him dead.”
“Did he tell you to get back to the kitchens straight away?” Erefan asked.
“No, in fact he told—”
“Good, then you can wait here until I’m hungry.”
He opened up the ancient manual and got back to work.
What time had passed, he knew not. Erefan had taken care in the placement of the room’s clock such that he could not see the time except by design. He had lost himself in the pages of a book whose age stretched back beyond reckoning, even though he had read through it a hundred times before.
The circuit diagrams were similar enough in style to the Spark Regulatory Society standards that he could follow them after years of practice. The tricks were the annotations. The digits in the numbers matched daruu mathematics, but he and Kezudkan had taken years in figuring out conversions for the units, mainly based on experimentation building some of the simpler designs from other books in the collection. The notes in the margins and beside some of the diagram elements were a total mystery. What exceptions they described, what precautions they advised, what clarifications they made: all were lost along with the language of the creators.
“This is getting cold,” Mifa said, talking with her mouth full. Erefan had heard the cover of the platter open and close a few times, but it was the first evidence he had that she was sneaking food from his dinner.
“Then don’t eat it,” he replied.
“I’m getting cold too,” Mifa whined. “Why don’t you have a furnace down here?”
“I’m sweating as it is,” Erefan replied. Having reminded himself of that fact, he buried his forehead against his sleeve and wiped away the sweat that beaded there. “You’re cold because you’re idle. If you want to warm up, lend a hand.”
It was a spontaneous offer, one that told Erefan that he was in need of sleep. He never would have even hinted at wanting a cook’s assistant for a helper had he been thinking clearly.
“I can help?” she asked, perking up. “Really?”
“Well—”
“Just tell me what to do!”
Three hours later, they were both soaked in sweat, sitting next to each other on opposite arms of the daruu-sized chair. They picked over the cold remains of the dinner Mifa had brought down. Mifa’s hands were stained with grease and oil like Erefan’s, but she had managed to limit the damage to her dress to just sweat. She had wiped her hands on a grease rag, which was now tucked into the top of her bodice.
“So that’s what you do down here all day, every day?” she asked, biting into a finger-siz
ed sausage.
“Well, of late, anyway. There’s always something to work on, and I work on it. Anything Kezudkan needs, I can build him. This machine is just the most recent.”
Mifa sipped at her tea—a fresh kettle, the only part of the meal that was hot. Erefan caught a look from her that hinted he might not have exhausted her ambitions for the night, as he had hoped.
“You must be wrung out,” he observed, trying to sound very concerned for her well-being. “I ought to let you get back upstairs, now you’ve seen sure that I’ve eaten.”
“Oh. I wasn’t just here to be sure you ate,” Mifa corrected. “Patron said I was to make sure you got to bed comfortably afterward, even if I had to take you there myself.” She smiled coyly at him, biting her lip.
“No.”
Her face frumpled instantly into a frown.
“Dammit Erefan! Why do you have to be so ... so...”
“Focused?” he suggested.
“Dense!”
“I’m not dense,” Erefan insisted. “I know what Kezudkan wants, probably better than you do.”
“He wants you to vent a little steam before you burst,” Mifa countered.
“He wants a child from me,” Erefan replied. “He can’t have one.” Erefan had saved one daughter from the daruu; he wouldn’t be party to giving another child of his into a life of slavery.
“He said he’d put me on stipend if I got with child by you,” Mifa whined. “I have a brother I ain’t seen since he got sold to the mines. Just do it for me, would you?” She leaned in toward Erefan.
Erefan slipped a finger under her collar, hooking her. He pulled her face toward his, but stopped her short of getting close enough to kiss him.
“You listen to me, and listen close,” he whispered harshly. She turned her face, but didn’t try to pull away. “Daruu, kuduk, it doesn’t matter. You don’t get anything given to you by them. You don’t take gifts, you don’t make deals. Anything they offer you, they’re taking more from someone else to give it. You want to go on stipend, but it would cost some poor babe a lifetime of slavery. You hear me?” He waited a breath, but Mifa didn’t answer. He gave a tug at her collar. “You hear me?” he repeated.
