Lands Beyond Box Set: Books 1 - 3

by Kin S. Law

  That was how I found Nessie Drake one morning, in a dive in the bad parts of Fort Chattanooga. It was a rented hovel no bigger than a shack, stinking from the slaughterhouses next door. But it wasn’t far from the mooring towers. The fact they were so close ought to have tipped off Nessie, more than anything. We were smarter than those starry-eyed girls you sometimes saw hanging round the base of the towers, hoping to catch a glimpse of their latest pulp fiction heroes.

  “Girl, you do what you want with your winnings, but any way you cut this, letting a man run off with a hundred silver dollars ain’t my idea of a good time,” I said as I shook out her empty purse.

  I was snippy, and it irked me. I had spent the better part of the morning looking for her, and here she was, sleeping naked like a fairy-tale princess. There wasn’t even the familiar jaunty smell of sex. The air was a little funky with sweat and livestock. I picked up the pleated gown draped neatly over a chair and shook it, trying to tell the value from the weight.

  “I hope you kept a couple of galleons from the Burton heist stitched in your knickers,” I remember saying.

  We were both gorgeous girls, plying the skies for fame and fortune, but Nessie Drake was as different from me as apples and oranges. Pale, thin, and waif-like, she nearly always played the straight man. Who would ever suspect a Lewis Carroll wet dream of coming after your valuables? Never mind she could strangle you half to death with a silk ribbon. With those raven locks down to her waist, and a thousand-yard stare lurking beneath her porcelain skin, the girl was beautifully diverting. It was her eyes, like a doll’s, flat and expressionless, and they fascinated people with their deep color, like heart’s blood.

  As soon as she rolled over and fixed those round garnets on me, I knew we were in deep shit.

  “Oh, screw me two ways to Tuesday, you’re in fucking love,” I cursed. I kicked at the much-abused door, which was splintered from having been knocked down just a minute before.

  “I was left those on purpose,” Nessie murmured. “Tried to make it look like an accident.”

  “You idiot! He obviously couldn’t be bothered to root through the seams. Rattlesnakes, he thought you were a local, even with those clipped consonants.” I was busy feeling for and tearing out what loose coins had been left in the gown. I found a dollar within, at least, and a collection of odd foreign currency, none of which was usable tender so far in the frontier. California was only a few states away, and the Lands Beyond, untamed territory as far as anyone cared. Paper money would be gone with the first blue storm.

  Done with the garment, I chucked it across the room so Nessie could cover herself. “Get dressed. We’re leaving on the Saratoga in an hour. Her captain lost arm-wrestling me in the pub.”

  Was I? Of course, you nitwits, of course I was jealous, now shut the hell up and listen.

  “I’m not going,” Nessie had the gall to protest. Nevertheless, she began to pull the gown on, lacing ribbons across her flat back. “We’re meeting in the Stablehand’s Breeches at noon. I’m going on their ship, the Lovelorn…”

  Christ on a cracker, the way she said the word, like it wiped away seven years of pilfering and running and hard knocks.

  “Here,” I said, fishing a small pocket-watch out of my own skirts. I think I still have the outfit, candy-striped, great with those suede boots…I was wearing tan and cream stripes over it, what the hell was I thinking?

  Right! Sorry! Okay. No stalling.

  I tossed her the locket, which was a decent timepiece in ball crystal, worth about forty quid. God, I tore up the place when she broke the damn thing, smashing it on the floor like plates at a Greek wedding. Little gears and aeon pebble everywhere.

  “Blast! It’s this late! She’ll have left without me! I have to get to the Lovelorn, right now!” Nessie screeched. She made a dive for her stockings, trying to get them on her arms. Her gloves were neatly folded on the bed stand, right over her dainty patent leathers.

  “My watch! Bitch, I’m taking this silver.”

  Nessie had no care for her partner. There was a wild look on her eyes I had never seen before. Nessie Drake was often pissed, smashed, or cynical, I’ve even seen her laugh, but I was not equipped to handle this.

  “My choker! Right, parasol…ribbons…have to look good when I get there, rouge…” Nessie’s mumbling scared me even more than her eyes. Her anal retentiveness was her best trait, had gotten us out of sticky situations a thousand times before. The fact she was losing it right now gave me gooseflesh all over my arms.

  “Listen, Nessie, it’s already two fifteen, I’m sure the Lovelorn is loosed from her tower already and miles away.”

  What I didn’t say was the Saratoga would be leaving in forty-five minutes, and if we weren’t on it, there was a high chance the church we had robbed in the guise of a chapter of the Salvation Army would discover, via telegraph, that Sister Goebbels and Sister Banks were safe in their sickbeds in Maine.

  “Rosa, you get out of the way right now. I’m going after the Lovelorn!”

  What could I do but follow the checkerboard confection as she stalked out of the hovel and down towards the mooring towers? Fully dressed, she cut a fancy figure striding across a dirt road, scaring cowboys and shopkeeps.

  At the base of the towers there was a makeshift bazaar of the type to be found in air docks the world over. I recognized familiar franchises advertising wares with carved, painted signage, illustrated, not printed, like old medieval shop fronts. The sky and bird of Albatross Shipping, the placid green nut of Ursine Gears for ship parts, and the streaky, abstract branding of Ubik Sundries. There was a bit of Valima Mordemere gadgetry. He had just begun to build his alchemic empire. Really exclusive stuff. With so many tongues spoken, everything was clearly labeled with a universal medium.

  Nessie stalked past all of these, even as the clerks swiveled their heads at the petite sugarplum fairy striding through their displays. She plowed through the colorful livery and into a mess of smaller counters where the swiveling turned to catcalling. Here were deals made, underground transactions conducted, illicit transport planned. Neither of us had planned on coming here in our nightwear, but I was well known, at least, from the evening’s merrymaking. I simply followed in Nessie’s wake, and her admirers backed the hell off.

  “Do you even know where the ship is?” I asked, once I drew level with Nessie. Even on my long legs it was difficult to keep up.

  “No, but I know what it looks like,” Nessie answered, never looking away from the varied shapes bobbing overhead. “Triangular hull, black with pink trim. Two sails, no balloon. Satyr figurehead.”

  “Wait, a satyr? I saw it, Nessie, I saw it.”

  Nessie’s shoes scraped to a stop on the hard dust.

  “Where?”

  We were in sight of The Breeches, a dilapidated shanty bar strung between two towers. The square, wood beams of the tower were completely obscured by planks, theatre bills, and structurally essential piles of beer crates. Even at a distance, it was clear there were only species of hopeless inebriate and the odd barback at the counter.

  I sighed.

  “Grid six, four by four. In the Potter’s.”

  Nessie Drake took off like taffeta buckshot. I followed at a more languished pace, now I knew where she was headed.

  Wealthy ship owners could book the few steel towers at a frontier port, while merchants leased from available lines strung from rusting piles of lumber and pig iron. Everyone else paid a small fee to tie up to scrub brush or tall hills in the Potter’s. Potter’s Fields were not so grisly as their name suggested, owing their nomenclature only to their common availability. Most of the frontier hubs have them, spaced out over flat, low land in a perimeter round the towers proper. Scattered across the fields were hopelessly unsalvageable hulks in the ground, picked over long ago by entrepreneurial opportunists, bleached by sun. They were about the scariest things there, like stoned trolls, and as threatening. Nessie obviously thought her Lovelorn could hardly be amongst the
rabble, and had made straight for the soaring edifices instead.

  I found Nessie on her knees at one of the downed dirigibles, her face cast in marble. I had walked slowly because I knew what the high cheekbones and pointed, elfin nose meant to say. Over those striking features, her burgundy eyes were fixed on a rotted wood wreck.

  “You’ll get a tan,” I managed, trying for Nessie’s vanity. It provoked no reaction, though two days ago Drake had thrown a fit when we were forced to traverse a mile of fields with naught but pilfered parasols for protection. Now she was kneeling exposed in the naked sunshine threatening to incinerate her pasty complexion.

  “I just thought…I thought it would never leave without me...” she murmured that day.

  After the betrayal, Nessie Drake wasn’t the same deadly efficient partner I had known. She messed up. Sometimes she let marks go on a whim, and other times she wouldn’t even show for a heist. Every free moment she had was spent hanging about airmen’s elbows, her eyes darting over the milling crowd even as her lips formed the most insipid interrogations. Of course she hadn’t given up. She was merely changing tactics. It was obvious she was convinced the Catastrophic Betrayal had been some kind of mistake. I could see it in her eyes, in the glaringly bright skirts and bustles and ribbons she now wore to attract attention. One of these days, she figured, we would hit on the right pub, in the right city, and there he would be, the airman of The Lovelorn, and he would sweep her off her feet.

  Meanwhile, I was the same old practical Rosa Marija. Truth be told, I hadn’t realized how deep the venom had stung, and besides I was too taken up with my gallivanting. I was enjoying my freedom far too much to realize my partner was deeply sick. Hell, I didn’t even realize she was so bothered until she started moving the airmen from the bars to her bed. By then, I think, she was far too gone.

  The black dresses were the first clue. Nessie Drake was given to a distinctly Gothic aesthetic, but now the black verged on funereal, her accessories sickened rather than charmed, and her already-pale skin took on an unhealthy pallor. She walked around toting a dead bat, scraping one long, black fingernail across the skin of any man who seemed to exhibit an undue interest in such fetishes.

  It couldn’t last. When a girl is possessed by an idea of a perfect lover, the idea warps, it changes, grows new heads. Love, if there ever was any, turns sour and intoxicating. Even the strongest of us can’t fight it. Nessie Drake had turned the sweet nectar of a chance romance into some fanatical vinegar, burning away at her breast. Even I never guessed the lengths she would go to fulfill it.

  Albion

  “But how did she get to be such a notorious dirigible pirate? And why ‘Countess?’” Elric Blair said after a long pause.

  I took a long draught of my tea, which had gone quite cold. My helmswoman had never told me this story.

  Rosa Marija’s tale had rendered The ’Berry’s galley a tableau of wide eyes and gaping mouths. Now that she stopped there was a minor flurry of activity as each person made a show of sipping or examining a nearby tchotchke.

  “Simple, really. Birds of a feather flock together. Most of her conquests were never the same. Even I was afraid of what she might do behind the curtains of the boudoir. A lot of them came out in the mornings like they would evaporate at the touch of sunlight. There was madness in their eyes, a frantic devotion. ‘Countess’ was just one of the names they whispered amongst themselves, but it was one that stuck.”

  “Pirates will call ourselves what we like. Most of Queen Victoria’s nobles these days are little different, all title and few lands to seat,” I noted.

  Rosa nodded and continued. “It seemed Nessie Drake had perfected what her original onerous romancer once did to her, a seduction like a strain of disease spread from her touch, her lips, her smell. It was only a short time before she commandeered her own ship, crewed by her devoted followers, and not long after she found out Ada Lovelace really did have a ship called the Lovelorn, commandeered and crewed two years after they had first met.”

  “Ahhh….” Someone, probably Alex, had a belated epiphany.

  “La Maere,” I said.

  “Blast it, Alby, yes, Nessie’s ship was La Maere. Alex I understand, but you’re usually sharp as a tack.”

  “No, La Maere. She’s right there, right outside the porthole.”

  In a flash, everybody pressed to the bulkhead, with Rosa Marija stuck to the glass tightest of all.

  15

  A Gothic Sitting-Room

  “The thing’s a fortress!” I heard one of my crew exclaim. It could have been any of them. We pretty much had the same reaction. I had expected little different. Chiropteran-class airships could only be called “strange,” a moniker certainly scoffed at by the builders of La Maere.

  Chiropteran-class were airships of a different color. There was the basket-and-balloon of the first dirigibles, the pressed helium frame of The Huckleberry, and the vast monolithic bulk of Balaenopteron-class warships, hanging in the sky seemingly in defiance of all laws of gravity. Chiropteran-class were so named not because of any particular size differences, but because they were laid out like their namesakes. Vast networks of thin ribbing were supported by flat gas envelopes between. The upshot of the arrangement was in their lift compound. The pressed gas could be pumped through the skeletal ribbing to raise or lower the ship quickly. The entire construction was capable of gliding through the sky even under no boiler power. It made for stealthy, fast ships usually favored by the ilk of the skies—namely, pirates.

  Then there was Nessie Drake’s La Maere. Not so much one ship as a cluster of several, the thing sprawled across Romania like it had dwelt there for centuries, feeding on blood from the necks of supple milkmaids. Gothic points marked bridges and quarters, while a phalanx of black, towering decks bristled with weaponry. Most pirates could only afford to field a ship of patchwork and gaffer’s tape. Nessie Drake required a vessel a la mode.

  “Basically,” Rosa Marija said. “I’m going down there. Is anyone with me?”

  “Do we have a choice?” I said.

  Hargreaves, and for some reason Blair, went as well. Cid, Auntie, Alex, and Jack stayed put. I ran a democratic ship. Anyone who did not volunteer were not asked as to why. Anyone who did was expected to do his or her part. I hadn’t worked out the newsman’s end game, but I had an idea. Still, it was better to keep him close. A few minutes later, we four slip-slided down the mountains, using the same cable anchors used to drop down on pirate targets. Our boots crunched through deadfalls and over salt rocks, while the ominous shadow of La Maere loomed in the near distance. It wasn’t long before we stumbled onto a paved path, and then we were rounding the peak where The ’Berry stayed hidden.

  Almost immediately, we saw Nessie Drake had not set down in a region of wilderness. The valley showed heavy, old tracks and soot from wheeled engines and steam tractors. The wilderness had simply grown over the old activity. In a moment, there rose around us the straight, planned grids of man’s residences in square pits on both sides of the road. There were signs of older structures, in the worked-over ground, but these had long been dug out and built over. As they approached La Maere, these buildings rose in gray, deserted obelisks.

  Rosa Marija began to yell, and this time nobody tried to stop her. She wandered a little ahead, enough for us to speak softly amongst ourselves.

  “According to the map,” Elric Blair said, inspecting his careful notes. “This is a small worker’s village for the Salina Praid, a salt mine prized since the Roman times. The majority of the village is below ground.”

  “Let me guess…they found aeon stones,” I said, pointing toward an abandoned lorry lying to the side of the road, its wheels rusted, its tires rotted off.

  The lorry was specially equipped with the isolating cages of aeon working to prevent the stones from floating off when exposed to steam equipment. The stuff was ubiquitous, and its properties only partially known. We owed the Steam Age to its sudden appearance before the last War
. It took an entire generation lost to fighting before we air pirates discovered the stuff could be used for commerce, and not just for a tactical advantage. Curiously, natural steam did little to aeon stones, but engines made them shoot off into the sky.

  They were the same stones Cid and I ground to make our lift compound. Most other airships simply circulated water over the stones but we air pirates liked to live dangerously. Blair agreed, and went on. “Aeon stone dust means easy wealth, and so the place shifted entirely over to mining them. After the place was dry, it was no longer profitable to hire back the old salt workers or rework the equipment.”

  “Blood suckers,” Hargreaves summarized.

  We continued forward, into the shadow of La Maere. Rosa’s profanity-strewn calls echoed off the street ahead, where industrial arclights had been strung in a barely visible glow. Nessie Drake had parked the ship on top of three buildings. Everything surrounding it was overgrown. From the sky, it would have been hard to see her, if I didn’t already know she was likely to be here. From below, the massive airship hovered like a monstrous bat.

  “If it were me, I would have stationed snipers there…there…and there,” Hargreaves remarked.

  “She knows we’re here,” I said.

  I also began to yell, only for Captain Sam, instead. What I hadn’t told Hargreaves was, Nessie was a collector of legendary trinkets in addition to handsome men. If she realized the import of what he carried, she might turn her claws towards Sam. But knowing Captain Sam, he wasn’t above manipulating her with his loot and his charm, either. It was going to be a nest of serpents we walked into.