Lands Beyond Box Set: Books 1 - 3

by Kin S. Law

  “What I meant was…” Blair began, but I filled in the awkward gap with a comforting acknowledgement.

  “No, you’re right,” I said, not wanting him to feel like I was offended. “Generally, pirates don’t read. There are lots of folks who don’t do Italian, or read Cyrillic, but most everybody has some English, or Condensed Chinese, depending on the bit of sky they fly in. There are those of us who fell into the profession because we couldn’t cut it in the rank and file. Then there are those of us who simply cannot be filed. There’s a difference,” I said.

  Wide-eyed and head drawn back, Blair looked a bit chastised, but also a little curious. From his mannerisms, he had clearly assumed all air pirates were scoundrels of the highest order. I was more than happy to show him that he was, in fact, in the company of an unorthodox intellectual.

  “And yourself? How did Albion Clemens, student of all arts, become the Manchu Marauder?”

  “I dabble in mechanical things, but not much else,” I evaded.

  We walked on for some time. The silence grew heavier than pig iron, so deep underground with only a journalist for company. I eventually had to acquiesce.

  “I grew up with the real Manchu Marauder, but Captain Sam kicked me off his boat when I turned eighteen. Said it was the way it was done in America. I pointed out we were in the Australian outback at the time, and besides I had never been American. He insisted it was the spirit of the thing.”

  “And you became a productive member of society, thus ending the legend forever,” Blair finished in jest.

  I gave him a look that set us both grinning. “Piracy came later, but I was back on an airship in a heartbeat. I found out Captain Sam had taught me too well. I was never happy with the way other people did things. People seem denser when they are stuck in one place. An airship opens you up to more things, more ways of living, more people than you would ever guess are out there. Once you know, the knowledge doesn’t let you sleep easy. Here we go.”

  I grunted, kicking at a riveted, brassy door. It was one of many along the tunnel, but here the mysterious telegraph wire threaded through a port in the doorframe. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect because I could see the doubt and curiosity in Blair’s eyes. Damnable paperman’s instincts. No doubt he was figuring out there were gaps in the five greats: How had I reached an airship port, or any civilization, if he had been left in the infamous outback? Why had Captain Samuel left his adopted son in the middle of nowhere? Had he been like the lions of Africa, shoving their young over the cliff so they could become strong through the climb back? But before Blair could ask, I was already opening the brass portal.

  “Well, butter my biscuits,” I said, stepping through the door.

  “Brilliant!” Blair echoed.

  The shine was almost too bright as we pulled the door free from its frame. A golden aura blasted through as if emitted by the Ark of the Covenant. It was arclight, pure and simple, from everyday Teslaic lighting, but what the light was reflecting off stoked my testosterone-filled heart.

  Before them lay dozens of shining, beautifully painted, chrome-detailed, antique steam carriages.

  “Real racing fenders!”

  “Look! An 1890’s vintage Fjord Eleanor!”

  It was a veritable smorgasbord of delectable candy-red racers, chocolate-brown roadsters, and gleaming white engines lined up in a profusion of neat, shimmering rows. There were ancient, well-maintained Fjords from the first days of line assembly, custom-fitted thoroughbreds culled from the Americas and Deutschland, rare one-offs and drifters from Nippon sitting in all their impractical glory.

  “Why would you ladies be sitting here all by your lonesome?” I asked. I strolled over to stroke my target, the green ‘97 Eleanor, with great enthusiasm, nearly tripping over something on the floor. The parking lines around the engines were raised into a sort of lip.

  “I say, fancy a cuppa two counties over, Miss?” Blair remarked, striding forward toward a white ’86 Panther. The carriages were sleek and low, with immaculate paintwork and bursting with deliciously decadent devices. A quick peek at the gauges showed each one watered and fueled, needing only the requisite starter ember to push her sophisticated engine mechanics into gear.

  Eventually, we got our knickers round the right way and began to look around at more than the cars. The underground chamber, while well lit, seemed deserted, and quite large, some twenty or so spaces from end to end. There seemed to be no information hub here. The telegraph wire ran along to the opposite end of the room where a terminal for contacting the church sat above.

  “This must be Mordemere’s private garage,” I remarked. “Only he could afford such extravagance. There could be one at each quarter of the city.”

  I climbed into the narrow bucket seat in his coupe and began to pump the sparker to get the engine going, but stopped when I realized there was nowhere to go. The vehicles were parked bumper to shining bumper. The door we had entered seemed to be a man-sized service hatchway. Other than it, there was no other door, leaving a bit of a mystery. How were these beautiful vehicles gathered here if there was no egress to drive through?

  Resigned, I climbed from the vehicle and walked over to one wall, where a large rectangular portal had been cut a little ways over my head. A lonely stepladder led up into empty space. Naturally, I investigated this direction and in a moment discovered a series of gantries mounted into the ceiling, but no pulleys, wire, or other equipment for raising or lowering a vehicle. Climbing onto the stepladder, I discovered a panel of switches.

  “Curious,” I said.

  Blair approached and looked over my shoulder.

  “Watch your feet. There seems to be a raised divot demarcating a sort of rectangle round each vehicle.”

  Together we examined the panel. A series of toggles spread out under two flip-style numerical indicator dials.

  “Very industrial-romance,” I remarked. “Almost like something out of a Philip K. novel. Speaking of pictures, I believe those are the prop Coopers from The Roman Heist. But never mind, let us tinker…”

  Twiddling the number dials, Blair selected two random numbers, ratcheting the flipping tabs into place with satisfyingly clicks, and tripped a promising-looking toggle. At once, a heretofore unseen device shot along the gantry like a hound after a rabbit, abruptly gliding across the ceiling as the entire frame slid along what seemed to be very thin rails. The device was compact, rather round, and was connected to a line of cables quite like the ones aboard The ’Berry.

  “Quite a machine,” Blair admired openly. “But what does it do?”

  “Like any other machine. Either a benefit or a hazard. If they’re a benefit, they’re not my problem,” I quoted, fancying myself the role of Deckard.

  Watching the sliding gantry brought to mind the sophisticated anachronism of the picture. Electric Sheep had been about a society with advanced industrialization, and a remarkably retarded moral code. I wondered how others would judge their Steam Age. Having arrived at a preset point, the gantry now hovered, as if unsure whether to be a hazard or a benefit. The rounded bottom of the device now hung over one of the many carriages, a rather fetching late ’90s Ultra Eight, once called the Chapman Eight, striped British Green.

  “Well? Do something else!” I said.

  Blair flipped another toggle, this time a rather large, imposing one.

  At once, the Chapman Eight shot up and detonated against the device with a spectacular bang, showering the room with shrapnel.

  Hargreaves

  The air wasn’t filled with sizzling shot, I soon discovered. It was, however, filled with pinging, irregular sounds quite a lot like gunfire, and something a lot more terrifying–the unreserved bellowing of grown men screaming in pain.

  “Someone needs help!” I shouted, and took off like a shot myself.

  “But Moore went that way!” Rosa cried in dismay.

  When I looked back the helmswoman was following, though she kept a weather eye on the elderly Jonah Moo
re until he disappeared behind another soaring warehouse.

  I discovered all too soon where the rattling sounds came from. A knot of people had ducked down just outside of a heavy loading door, and the wall facing it was pitted with holes. The sight was obvious for subjects who had grown up around steam engines of Victoria’s reign. A boiler had blown, and instead of detonating in a spectacular cloud of metal and mist, it had simply fired all its rivets outward like bullets.

  “Is everyone all right?” I yelled. I wasn’t panicked. Instead, a familiar feeling of competence settled over me. By Queen and Country, my day job was Scotland Yard! I felt a little more like myself when there were people I could help.

  A window shattered just before me, and I reacted by tumbling forward into a crouch, while Rosa slid to the ground beside her in a flurry of skirts and swashbuckling agility.

  “We’re unhurt!” one of the men lying face-first on the pavement replied, gesturing towards everyone outside. “But Hassim and Swarney were closest. I saw Harrod take a rivet to the knee!”

  “Where is he?” I called back. The man made a wild, panicked motion, indicating somewhere inside the building.

  “You had best be careful!” A woman, ginger and lucidly staring up from a sensible spread-eagle well away from the door, cautioned.

  But I paid no mind. Instead I dove through the door into a darkness spitting sparks and death. Scotland Yard constables were chosen for a tendency to dive into danger, not flee from it.

  At first, as the warm black of the factory enveloped me, and I thought I was alone, tumbling into a steaming maw with jaws of iron. Something whistled past my shoulder and embedded into a column with a solid thunk. It ignited into a steady glow to reveal one of Rosa’s slender throwing daggers. A fall of blue-white sparks fell from the handle, showing the column, and a boiler beneath it spilling water from half a dozen holes. Beneath the rusted red bulk, a work boot sat in a growing puddle of red.

  “Hurry!” Rosa’s disembodied voice called from the opening. I couldn’t even see her through the dark and the steam. Hot pipes lurked in the darkness. I could feel them, radiating against my skin.

  As I entered, I barely registered the horseshoe over the door—a charm, to ward off ill luck. I grabbed the man’s boot in the puddle, and immediately dropped it. The other end wasn’t connected to anything. A moment’s search later, and I found the rest of him a few feet away, and then it was a matter of firmly grasping him by the collar and manhandling the weight out of the door.

  “Pressure, here…”

  “Yes, right…no, you bloomin’ idiot, there’s no way we can get it back on.”

  “Oh my God…oh my God…”

  The susurrus of concerned voices came with a few sets of hands as the other workers helped me drag the man away from the ricochet of rivets. It was difficult, but I whipped the belt off the closest workman for a tourniquet, who looked surprised but kept holding the injured man’s neck up. The panic seemed to die down somewhat. The hurt man, Hassim, was wearing a turban over skin going ashen from lost blood.

  I barely got the buckle cinched tight before Rosa pulled me away from the crowd, her digits waving vaguely at the sound of constabulary whistles in the air. I balked. In my rush to save the unfortunate Hassim, I had forgotten I was not the law here.

  “There are still people who need help, Rosa Marija!” I protested even as I fell into rhythm behind Rosa’s brisk footfalls.

  “We dragged the other man, Swarney, out while you were tying up the first one. Waste of time, in my opinion, he’d lost too much blood. Everyone else is accounted for,” Rosa said, as we reached the corner where Jonah Moore had disappeared.

  “A waste of time!” I sputtered, unable to comprehend the singular callousness with which this cold cutthroat handled human life.

  “Did you really want to meet the clankers again?” Rosa reminded me. “If they find out you work for the Queen…”

  Victoria III had initially championed the development of geartowns like Leyland, but was now adamantly against them. The Inspector in me knew without a doubt the Queen’s presence here, if discovered, warranted a political incident. Still, there were people who needed to be saved!

  “Rosa!” I protested, but nearly ran into Rosa’s ample bosom as she spun to a stop on her heel.

  “Vanessa,” Rosa said, gently. She put a hand on my shoulder, arresting my forward momentum.

  “Saving a man’s life is not a waste of time,” I insisted, staring deep into Rosa’s tawny eyes.

  “No, it is not,” Rosa agreed, looking right back into mine. “If it can be saved. Everyone is all right. I made sure of it. The clankers will deliver the injured to the nearest hospice, they’re strong enough with those piston arms. You bound the other man, Hassim, was it? You likely bought him the time, but now there is nothing more we can do. The best thing for us, and for our mission, is to be on our way.”

  The hardness in Rosa’s eyes scared me, but it was the gentleness that made me back down. For a moment, I was reminded of Albion Clemens, and the way he looked the first evening in Portsmouth when he first got the best of me; kind, but with an edge to cut diamond.

  “I am starting to have an inkling of Jonah Moore’s purpose, why he was visiting the Leyland Cross and the engine factory,” Rosa said, resuming her stride.

  Our boots were well past the point where Moore had disappeared, but Rosa walked as if she knew where she was going. It had been a few minutes. Surely Moore had left us behind? Rosa was walking so quickly, I almost missed a large statue of a man whose features were cut out of knives. But it was obvious from the beaker in the right hand and the wand in his left, this was none other than an incarnation of the infamous Valima Mordemere.

  “As I thought,” Rosa said as she passed by, not stopping. “We do not have much time.”

  I was a good inch taller than Rosa, and kept up easily once we drew level.

  “Right, you had better share what you’ve figured out, or we’re stopping right this second!”

  While I didn’t literally mean stop, I managed to get the point across. We were professionals in our own right, in fields where time meant the difference between a successful collar and a successful escape. Rosa kept clicking her hard boots while she spoke.

  “They are like urchins,” Rosa began.

  She reached an intersection and peered intently at a faded signpost. She turned down an enclosed shopping avenue instead of a block of cookie-cutter houses.

  “What the devil are you on about?” I pressed, following closely.

  “Street urchins,” Rosa said, “are dependent on the kindness of strangers. But not really, you see, they’re more like the servants of strangers. You see them all the time, begging in the street, dying by the score and surfacing beneath the snow in the springtime.”

  As we walked, I couldn’t help but look into the dark corners of the alleys between bright shop fronts. London was full of urchins, ready for service at the gleam of a penny. Yet, in Leyland, there seemed not a single small, dirty boy or girl, waiting to perform some queer errand for the odd shilling.

  “They are ubiquitous. They go everywhere, and I’d bet a Spanish galleon no organ grinder in London would recognize one from another, even if they’d been working together all season.”

  “Get to the point already,” I snapped.

  “Sure, we will toss them the odd coin, put them to work, but there’s not a single parent to look after them, feed them, bathe them even when they caterwaul against it. And, just as surely, those workmen and women back there, not a soul’s looking after them either.”

  The finery in the windows distracted me. Here, the blank walls were replaced with gilt storefronts. Coach makers displayed shining brocades and smiths showed off the intricacy of their devices. Richly carved clocks sung the time while personal difference engines gleamed, porcelain tablets with smooth black faces. Mordemere’s genius seemed like it was easy to capitalize on for all the custom workers and repairmen in the city. I couldn
’t help but admire a two-wheeled velocipede in one window, its seat cropped to the size of a postage stamp for swift rides to the cafés. The massive front wheel had been lacquered gold.

  I also couldn’t help but make the comparison to the slums we had just left, though I regretted it right away. I was eager to find out what Rosa had discovered. Just a few streets back, the factories had been sitting in coal-black streets littered with garbage. The Cross had been a foot deep in rot. Perhaps some hidden part of me wished to leave it all behind.

  “I saw the state of their clothes, yes. Migrant Irish, some Indians, and other foreign riff-raff,” I said.

  This time, it was Rosa who whirled about, fury darkening her coffee brow.

  “Those riff-raff,” Rosa hissed through gritted teeth, “are making your guns, and your ships, and your Empire, but because he was born outside the Empire, that man you tied up can’t afford the bandages or the splints needed to treat his leg. Even if he were to get better, no factory will hire a man who can’t walk five paces to pick up a wrench. Don’t talk to me about saving people, you privileged, stupid Englishwoman.”

  Rosa resumed walking, her legs churning the brilliantly polished cobbles to a frothing dust.

  “But the Commonwealth!” I protested, chasing after Rosa.

  “Rests on a great mountain of bodies just like Hassim, back there. Just like the bodies of the servant urchins, found dead under the snowmelt,” Rosa spat. Though she had worked up a great head of steam, her eyes were constantly searching.

  “There, unfortunately, is also how I know what our Jonah Moore is up to.” Rosa paused, evidently sighting something.

  I knew better than to interrupt. Besides, I was torn. I had always believed in my country, but the truths were self-evident. I had seen more than my share of moors, cockneys, and foreigners as a constable as criminals detained with the Yard, and hadn’t bothered to question why there wasn’t a single member of the gentry or the noble in with the lot. Indeed, Rosa hadn’t even wanted to discuss the issue until provoked. Better to follow and wait for the answers to come, I decided. At least the physical exertion was straightforward, making it easy to know where I stood.