by Kin S. Law
Everyone knew of Valima Mordemere’s vast empire of steamworkings, from the carriages puffing along London’s streets to the very guts of Her Majesty’s Knights of the Round, working night and day to keep her defenders in the air. Mordemere designed and manufactured wonders, much like a coal-fired Wizard of Oz. It seemed fitting his city was made not of emerald, but of streaked soot.
“As to why we’re in a steam car and not on The ’Berry, there you will find an answer,” Clemens said, tone ripe with resentment.
I took a cue and peered out into a middle distance. Two mounds of metal were slowly approaching like a brace of tin men. Only, instead of charming woodcutters, these bipedal monstrosities looked like they were capable of processing entire forests into pulp. The one on the right brandished three-foot-long chrome claws, while the one on the left possessed a massive cannon strapped to its back, hanging over its slumped iron head like a crucifix. A tangled web of thick India rubber and copper mesh connected the cannon to some elaborate, steaming mass of machinery.
No doubt Clemens was imagining the damage such a weapon might do to his precious ship, for as we passed under the watchful eyes of the drivers, he cursed under his breath. For yes, the monstrosities were no creatures out of myth, but were cut with eye-slits across their plate bellies for people to see through.
“Kobolds,” Clemens muttered. “Blasted slag heaps. Because of them, no pirate has the edge on Mordemere’s logistics. His secrets are his alone.”
“I’d say a businessman has a right to safeguard his professional secrets,” I protested. “What right have you to complain?”
“He’s just jealous he doesn’t have one,” Rosa said.
Apparently the kobolds had been instructed to leave the road alone for Clemens and our company passed without incident. There was no time to relax, however, for soon a brace of hooded, cloaked figures approached our bumbling little Fjord. Clemens stopped, rolling down a window.
“What’s your business?” A rasping voice drifted out from beneath the black hood.
The face was obscured by the Fjord’s B-pillar. Strange, I thought. By the height and the gait, I would have placed a young man underneath.
“My Fjord needs a few parts. Thought one of your traders might have an old-style fuel rotator assembly, and a couple new caps,” Clemens spoke loudly, so the others gathered by the roadside could hear.
I could see one more hooded figure and a uniformed constable nearby. When none of them spoke, Clemens fluttered the throttle in neutral, and the old pressure vessels in the carriage’s bonnet gave an ungodly screech.
“Carry on,” the inquisition yielded, and Clemens drove past.
We continued on into the heart of Leyland where clustered pipelines grew thick and heavily machined aqueducts chased the roads. The Fjord passed over one such structure, a massive series of arches vaulted over a cavernous mine shaft, lined with workshops, shacks, and lean-tos, fully a mile across.
“I wasn’t aware Her Majesty allowed the establishment of private police states within the confines of the homeland,” Blair said once they were firmly out of earshot.
I could understand his new attitude. Up until this point we had been on unfamiliar pirate ground where he was concerned. Here, Blair finally had a handle on things. Suddenly his nausea wasn’t quite so bad, and he was back to being a journalist. Back to passing judgment on the status quo. As an Inspector of Scotland Yard, charged with protecting the peace, his ink wasn’t quite my cup of tea.
“It is common knowledge,” I said. The words had to badger their way past an uncomfortable squirm. “Alchemists like Valima Mordemere have a special permit with the Ministry of the Interior. There are thirty-seven special administrative districts where development of the country’s steamworks resources are encouraged to their utmost.”
“I am aware of these so-called geartowns,” Blair scoffed. “And your official propaganda doesn’t really butter my toast, if you get my meaning. I know what they are; city-sized arms laboratories in response to the Ottoman threat. Are you telling me you did not see the bulge off the man’s back? Those are assault rifles, ma’am, or two and three make four. Is this merry England or the untamed Americas? Expect to see many insurgents in the heath? Mordemere is protecting Leyland with a little too much pluck.”
“I’m surprised, Elric,” Clemens spoke up before the venom could erupt boiling from my gullet. These towns were essential to the defense of the Pax Britania! “Didn’t you see the weight of his tread?”
“About fifty pounds heavier than he should, bucko,” Rosa agreed, as if she were waiting for just this line of conversation. “Or about three and a half stone to you. His footsteps left a hole clear through to Imperial China.”
“What are we talking about?” protested Blair.
“Care to weigh in, Inspector?” Clemens whisked backward, not looking away from the paved road.“If I’m not mistaken, those would be Mordemere’s famous clankers,” I supplied, quite keen on the subject of peacekeeping. At least the clankers were something substantial to talk about, and not Blair’s paranoid ranting.
“Clankers?” Blair squirmed visibly in his seat. Understandably so, as he was the only one not worth jack in a fight.
“Wankers, if you enjoy the nomenclature,” Clemens said through a chuckle.
“And my gorgeous enjoys his nomenclature,” Rosa chimed in.
“You two remind me of a certain criminal clown couple from the pictures,” Blair snapped. “What are clankers?”
“Murderers, mostly,” Hargreaves said.
Everyone in the Fjord was getting far too comfortable with each other. Everybody seemed adept at cutting off each other’s annoying habits. Maybe it was the air piracy, seeming to pull people together through a mutual desire to commit debauchery and not fall out of the sky.
“Disenfranchised marines, exiles, and special operatives lured by high wages and the swagger of pulling a trigger.”
Rosa flipped round in her seat again, put two hands together, flat, until they were separated by a book cover’s distance. It looked like she was peering out through the slats of a fence. “We found a piece for sale, once, at the Hook. Really weird stuff, the clanker armor, Cid wouldn’t stop pestering us for the funds to get more. It’s a lightweight sandwich of flexible hexagons. Looked like pencil lead, but didn’t make a mark. We shot it, of course, tried setting it on fire, set a steamthrower on it—”
“Steamthrower?”
“High-pressure, high-heat vitriol spray.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Anyway,” Rosa went on. “None of it made a mark on the armor itself, but the goods it was supposed to protect tended to be vulnerable to large-caliber firearms. We had to peel bits of lamb shank off it before Cid finally confiscated it from us.”
“Clankers wear heavy chrome gauntlets and greaves,” Clemens jumped in. “They’re pushed around with pressure pistons fueled by a tank on their backs. Not to mention, those hoods and masks don’t let you see the man inside. Who knows if there’s a black belt or a garrote commando behind there?”
Suddenly everything in the Fjord went a little quiet. I had a feeling everyone was thinking the same thing. Though we knew little about the Laputian Leviathan, if Mordemere was the one behind the theft of Europe’s landmarks, at the least it made me, an Inspector for the Crown, his enemy. Captain Samuel was definitely involved in this somehow, which made Albion Clemens inextricable from the situation.
One look at Elric Blair squirming in his seat, and I realized maybe not everyone was thinking the same thing. As a small-time scribbler for a no-name counterculture press, he had no place in a fight between armored mercenaries with rifles and steam-throwing pirates.
Before anyone could muse on backing out, Albion pulled the rickety Fjord up to a stop before the remains of a charming village church. Its stately square tower had long ago been converted to a convenient communications center. Telegraph wires and large Morse lamps for signaling to the distant airship docks sprouted f
rom it. Rusty wire grating covered up places where ornate stained glass once depicted biblical mysteries. Not a scrap of vegetation grew at all.
Blair was the first one to vault out of the vehicle. Right on his heels, I bent to rub the journalist’s back. I couldn’t help it. I felt terrible for the poor man who had to be most certainly fearing for his life. As we bent over a ditch, I made out the thud of Clemens’ heavy boots, and the graceful stride of Rosa’s heels clicking.
“Riding from shore to shore through thin air you can handle, but the feel of England’s roads does you in?” I asked as gently as I could.
“I apologize, Inspector,” Blair managed.
“Okay. From here, we can ask a clerk to pull up records of all the recent activity involving the search for the Leviathan,” Clemens said. The tall Oriental threw his arm around the paler-than-usual Blair’s shoulders. “This would be a good time for you to assist me, by the way. Put those researching skills to good use.”
This seemed a little out of character for the dashing pirate, but I was starting to realize there was much more to him than I had originally thought.
“That sounds simultaneously tiresome and tedious. Do you mind?” Rosa complained, the picture of idle apathy.
“Fine, get a little pissed, Rosa,” said Clemens.
“I believe I will go with you, Miss Marija,” I spoke up.
An interesting series of expressions crossed Rosa’s face, but she settled on bemused intrigue in the end. She motioned toward a nearby pub. With a nod, I set off in that direction with her.
“Well, then. There go the peacock and the crow,” I heard Clemens comment. “Shall we?”
And so the gentlemen were off to the library, and the ladies to the pub.
19
It’s Never Just a Pint
Hargreaves
“We aren’t really having a pint, are we?” I mentioned as soon as the men were out of earshot. In the distance, our cohorts wound their way merrily between the ancient graves as if they were coming off a six-pub crawl. The dead seemed to be the only ones undisturbed by the cables snaking through the old church.
“Damn it Hargreaves, I’ve just come off a long drive in a small cabin with those two. I need something to get the smell off me,” Rosa said. “But, yes, after a cold one I would like to poke around a bit. Up for a jaunt?”
“It was my intention, yes,” Hargreaves agreed. “Past the public sphere, very little is known about Mordemere’s little empire up here. Meaningful traffic stops at the airship dockings, after all.” Something about Blair’s suspicion had roused the doubt inside of me. I very much wanted to see for myself what the geartown of Leyland was like.
“Alby might be a bit dense, but he can play his cards. We should be able to shake loose some information from the locals.”
I pulled up the collar on my long, tight coat a little further. Leyland was in Lancashire, as wet and cold as it got without being in Scotland. Amazingly, Rosa sauntered about with her shoulders bare and legs in tight leggings. Her usual assortment of blades hung off a wide belt.
Thankfully, the cold stopped at the door of the pub. If they knew anything, the Celts knew how to keep out the damp. Inside a fire roared near big squashy armchairs watched over by a ruddy, snow-capped barkeep. Already a mid-afternoon congregation consecrated themselves with the liquid body of Christ.
“Oy! Two!” Rosa mouthed across the pub, instantly at home.
They collected libations and parked close to the fire. A crowd of unruly, well-watered dunderheads materialized around the attractive ladies. Suddenly the air was full of “bonny lass” this and “a buss for a codger!” that and then “ah was just coddlin’ the lady, yer chump!”
“My dear Inspector, your interrogation begins,” Rosa presented, and at once proceeded to charm the nearest handsome fellow.
I was not one to slack the heavy lifting, and undid my coat, revealing a prim traveling dress that showed off my long limbs.
Two hours later, we reconvened outside the back door of the pub, breathlessly shooing the patrons back inside with a dab hand.
“Those…boys…are persistent,” I managed. “Shall we compare notes?”
“Aye,” Rosa replied, adjusting her ribbons. “I believe the tall brown one, Nigel, was the grabby one. Paul might have had a handful while I wasn’t looking, but he knew what he was doing so I’m not too upset about it. Look at you, hoarding the straight-and-narrow types.”
“I meant about the city, Miss Marija,” I said with some amused ire.
“Getting to it, Inspector,” Rosa said, straightening up.
We exchanged a look, and strode off in opposite directions.
“Where are you going?” I demanded.
“I was about to ask the same of you!”
“I think we both heard it when—”
“Nigel said there was a—”
“But we should head—”
“Likely as not—”
We stopped in our tracks, glaring at each other through swimming eyes. Frustration boiled beneath a thin veneer of politic in Rosa’s eyes.
“Okay,” Rosa said first. “It doesn’t matter. You go your way, and I go mine.”
“What is this, a picture house drama? That’s your way, the pirate way. Why can’t we share the information like responsible investigators?” I reasoned.
“Because we’re pirates? If Captain Sam had a shittier relationship with Cid and the others, they would be running away with Albion’s ship. Pirates do whatever we want, basically.”
I sighed.
“All right. On three. One…two…”
“The Cross!” We shouted at the same time
“Ah. Well, that would be this way,” I added, pointing to a nearby tourist’s sign, well-worn and in bad repair. As I took a step towards it, though, I stumbled, catching my foot on a stone. The machine city spun around me.
“Shit. I’m bloody wasted too. Lead on, Inspector.”
So we tottered on down the lane, more or less in the right direction and giggling the whole time.
Albion
As the ladies got to know the locals, Elric Blair was desperately trying to stop a blatant act of vandalism, and possibly blasphemy. As for me, the Manchu Marauder? I was eager to commit a blatant act of vandalism. That’s what a proper pirate would do. Mainly I had grown weary of the uncooperative people who fielded the communications around here.
“Trust me, Captain Clemens; we will find what we want quicker if we let the clerk do his job,” Blair reasoned, taking the axe away from my loose fingers.
We backed away from the wooden records door, a thin, fragile plank that used to be a portal between the church proper and a rectory building.
“He’s been in there a whole hour!” I complained.
“Sometimes the filing mechanisms get stuck. Even alchemists can’t keep up with all the maintenance. Besides, we’ve asked for some very old records,” Blair advised, placing the axe back atop a special fire brigade rack, alongside a first-aid box and a bottle of laudanum some enterprising employee had squirreled away. I appropriated the bottle on sight.
We backed away in front of the counter and into the empty chapel. The wooden pews served as seating in a sort of waiting room when no service was held. Not even a priest flitted before the simple altar.
“I bet you five quid he’s in there holed up with another bottle. Something nicer, even, like a Scotch.”
Elric sighed, his exasperation evident. I had to hide a smile. I took great pleasure in irritating the stuffy journalist, mostly because it meant he had stopped being afraid of the pirates and started to show me what he was all about–resourceful, yet bound by laws of English etiquette. It was amazing to see the dichotomy. Before Elric had to come up with another appeasement, the door in question opened. The clerk held the door open as he looked around, as if expecting something out of place.
“All the materials you requested are in reading room six. If you require any specific records, please pull the
bell rope and I will be with you shortly,” the clerk said.
Blair and I swept through the door, my buccaneer coat brushing both sides of the frame. The clerk raised one eyebrow. The reading room was further back, furnished only with hard wooden chairs and a table heavy with bound volumes and a solid black trunk about the size of a dispatch case.
“There’s less here than I thought,” I remarked, picking up a volume and leafing through, only to turn to Blair, stumped by the rows of tiny black squares within.
“Brilliant! Microfiche!” Blair exclaimed.
“7th generation,” the clerk said with a proud smile. “We’ve gotten the magnification down to about one to five hundred or so, at one-thousandth scale.”
“So these volumes…the squares….” I said, a terrible feeling coming over me.
Blair clicked open the dispatch case to reveal a contraption of fine slivered metal. Trying to get a better look, I leaned over his shoulder. A small lever waited to notch into place, ready for cranking, and a drum of fine coppery fibers connected to an Edison bulb.
“Quite correct,” the clerk filled in. “Each square contains approximately five hundred pages of material. I’ve collected volumes relating to the years Master Mordemere and the mainstream community of dirigible enthusiasts most actively searched for the Leviathan. There are records and periodicals from all across the world, as well as journals, special reports, and a few books on the subject.”
It might have been my imagination, but the clerk certainly seemed to be well satisfied with himself as he closed the door, leaving me and Blair in the room. It was easier, of course, to hide information in a mountain of rubbish than it was to safeguard it exclusively. How would anybody separate the useful things from the hearsay?
“Do you think he heard us outside?” I remarked, dropping the tome I held with a bang.
“Undoubtedly,” Blair said as he slotted one of the squares into the machine’s port. He cranked the lever, and an abrupt light shone from the bulb, pasting a large block of text onto the white wall before us. For the first time, I noticed the room had no windows.
