Lands Beyond Box Set: Books 1 - 3

by Kin S. Law

  The old Fjord had a few problems starting up, but Rosa Marija managed to stoke the boiler into life with only a few cranks of the embers.

  “Change out the fuel! And start her in neutral on the first compartment; you get better pressure that way,” Albion instructed.

  In response, Rosa simply cracked him over the head with a boot, before putting her bare foot down and easing the Fjord into motion. The grinning captain didn’t seem to mind. I, on the other hand, felt a pang of something. Was I jealous? No, impossible! The very idea! Me, and Rosa? Or was it Albion?

  There wasn’t time to think through the incomprehensible feelings rushing through my middle. Rosa put the Fjord into a reasonable gear and we rolled forward. We tried to huddle in a manner that hid Jonah Moore in the center. In the street, the sedan would look like any other civilian steam engine, but once we got to the checkpoint, it would be a whole other bag of worms. Would the clankers be busy dealing with the situation in the center of Leyland, and leave the checkpoint unattended? A train had collided sideways with an expensive automobile, and a man had fallen to his death from one of the majestic aqueducts. Not to mention, who was dealing with the situation underground? Everything was in flux, and my nerves were wound tighter than a broken heart spring. Even my braid had become all fuzzy as the strands of gold sprang free of their bonds.

  “Moment of truth, everyone,” Rosa announced, all too soon for my liking.

  The Fjord pulled to a stop before the checkpoint. The first thing I noticed was no clankers. Instead, a kobold loped over, shaking and thundering, to lean over the Fjord. To my horror, this one carried a massive Gatling gun, belt-fed to a drum of ammunition on the horrible thing’s back.

  “The city’s on lockdown. Turn around, civie,” a tinny, amplified voice thundered from above.

  “He’s a contractor; he’s a civilian as well,” I heard Blair mutter.

  To my further horror, I saw Rosa lean out of the Fjord, her creamy chocolate bosom showing through one undone button. “Hello, gorgeous,” she said.

  Then she leaned out too far for me to catch what she was saying. There seemed to be a lot of wiggling about, but the gist of it was painfully clear.

  “No. You’ll have to wait with the rest, there. I don’t much care how badly you need to get out of that bodice,” the voice boomed, echoing like a fly stuck in a tin can.

  “All right, don’t get snippy,” Rosa said, now perfectly audible. “Plan B. Let’s see how you like a face full of independence, eh?”

  Smooth as silk, Rosa’s hand came up armed with three of her patented knives. I recognized in a split second the sparkling fire variety before the hand snaked out of sight. There was a bit of clinking, and a stabbing motion to Rosa’s arm, and suddenly the window was full of multi-colored sparks. Dead useful, those blades. I hoped she had more of them as the ground shook. The kobold pilot struggled to free his view of the festive inferno, waving the claws around like a lobster in a trap.

  “Go, go, go!” Rosa called.

  Suddenly, Albion was there, in the driver’s seat with his helmswoman still hanging outside the window. His foot came stomping down and his hands blurred over the controls. The Fjord felt like it reared up, and we were off, rocketing forward towards the woefully inadequate barrier ahead. As the wooden planks splintered before us the Fjord gave a little heave and Rosa tumbled down into Albion’s lap.

  “Hello, gorgeous…” Rosa purred, index finger tracing here and there.

  “Right! We’re running away from bloodthirsty mercenaries in steamwork suits; let’s at least die properly!” I protested.

  I yanked Rosa off and pressed Albion’s gun into her hands, freshly appropriated from his hip. Not one to leave the fighting to others, I whipped my Tranter out and leaned out the opposite passenger window as well. There I beheld a truly horrifying sight.

  A kobold, likely a different one standing by, was now in full pursuit of us. The other was open at the chest. It wore burn marks all over, and the exposed pilot looked—in a word—bloody pissed. Both of them loped all out, Gatlings clutched in their claws already spinning up.

  “Albion…” I said.

  “Drive faster!” Rosa finished for me. Then the gunfire began in earnest, and nobody could hear a damn thing.

  22

  Secret of Leviathan

  Albion

  “The question I have for you is,” Rosa wondered aloud, back aboard The Huckleberry as we sailed toward the last known location of the cataclysm ravaging Europe. “Why would Captain Sam be involved in all of this?”

  I thought this over as I watched my crew, rubbing at the spots where the goggles had compressed my face. I didn’t have a clue why Captain Sam had gotten into something this big. We were air pirates, not heroes. We were like ants trying to move a pot of sugar from the table of giants. My hands came away black with gun soot.

  The ominous cloud of Mordemere had last been spotted headed over Eastern Europe. After London, Paris, and Rome, Berlin had been hit. There had been considerable violence at the Brandenburg gate, and reports of clankers had come through the telegraph. Thanks to Jonah Moore’s information, we now had a handle on possible locations Valima Mordemere might strike. A pool had been established, with Rosa betting heavily on St. Petersburg’s historic churches, while the men of the ship were dead set on the Kremlin as the only possible target. Inspector Hargreaves kept a suspicious silence, though more than once I caught her touching the odd parcel in her pockets or speaking quietly to herself.

  Rosa had changed. For reasons unknown, she had switched to a long turquoise dress, well ruffled, that hung off her creamy shoulders like a lover. Embroidered all over the dress and matching headscarf were moons and stars, and when she moved little bells jangled a bewitching tune. She looked less like a tart and more like a monarch’s courtesan. She was absolutely stunning. Such was often my opinion of her outfits. It would take a battalion of cavalry to drag it from me, though.

  “Get your feet off the compass,” I said instead. “I suspect we will have to inquire of the generous Jonah Moore. He seems frothing at the bit to stop Mordemere, possibly more than you, Inspector.”

  Vanessa Hargreaves sat on a ledge on the bulkhead, following the conversation while looking out over the deck, where Elric Blair was busy vomiting over the edge. Somehow, he had become extraordinarily sensitive to motion after the adventure in the Fjord. Whether or not the Inspector had changed remained a mystery. She seemed perfectly comfortable in her form-fitting gray duster and tight leggings.

  “I can relate to Moore’s situation, Captain Clemens,” Hargreaves answered me without turning. “We’ve all done things we wish we could have taken back. Perhaps not something we’ve been holding onto for thirty or more years, though. He looked…mournful, crossing those old places.”

  “That feeling is what gave Mordemere the aeon power to control Leyland,” I agreed. “It was a trap. Mordemere designed it that way, and it has worked perfectly until we came along and snipped at the springs, at least, where Moore is concerned.”

  A glimmer of flaming light to the eastern horizon broke up the solid gray skies ahead. Impossible. The sun was nearing its zenith. I shook it off, dismissing it as a trick of light.

  “Let’s go talk to Moore,” He said, heading for the stair down to the rest of the ship.

  By silent consensus, we agreed to leave Blair up top. With his powers of deduction, whatever was said would be inferred contextually the next time he saw one of us anyway. The Huckleberry was quiet as we three made our way below. Auntie was where Auntie always was–in the galley, experimenting on a new, surely delicious culinary concoction. Cockney Alex was out in the longboat, shooting what game could be found further ahead. As for Cid Tanner, the sounds of his tinkering came shuddering through the ship every few hours.

  “So long as we hear those explosions,” Rosa explained to Hargreaves, “we know he’s alive.”

  As for the elderly chap, Jonah Moore had been surprisingly hale as he stepped out o
f the ruins of the Fjord and onto the rope ladder dropped from The ’Berry. Still, when I offered quarters for Moore to rest, they had been accepted gratefully, with the request he not be disturbed for several hours. As it was well past this time allotment, I felt it was high time to disturb him.

  “Mister Moore?” I asked, rapping firmly on the ship’s dense cabin door.

  Overhead, the various charms affixed to the lift lines jangled or shuffled according to their propensities. I thought they were trying to tell me something, though I had never developed the capacity to understand them. Sam had, though some of that might have been bluster. The aeon in the lifts was akin to sorcery more than science.

  “Something’s wrong.” By contrast, Rosa was remarkably astute. “Moore’s in trouble.”

  “Daft old bugger!” Inspector Hargreaves cursed roundly. “He’s strained himself too much to get off the bunk. Move!”

  “Hold on, don’t just go round kicking down my ship!” I interrupted, nearly clotheslining the insistent Inspector. I reached down, undid a panel beside the door lock, and slipped the tumblers open. “There we go.”

  Inspector Hargreaves gave me a long look, before grabbing the knob and shoving the wooden barrier aside.

  “Master Moore? Jonah Moore?” Hargreaves said.

  I knew it was no futile, emotive call. The Inspector was trained to stimulate a potential victim by sounds he might be used to, such as his own name. At least, I had read about it.

  The gray gentleman was not in his bunk. Instead, he sat in the chair beside it, arms placed on the rests, feet flat on the deck. He was fully dressed in what he arrived in, but his face was pale and the intelligent eyes were closed. The Inspector knelt, inadvertently giving me a fine view of her posterior.

  “There’s no pulse,” Hargreaves said, as she backed off from Moore’s neck. “Help me get him on the floor.”

  With my help, she wrangled the stiff chap onto the bare boards. Moore’s back was still warm, but his lower body and limbs seemed oddly cold. I shuddered. Air piracy did have a propensity to attract corpses. I wondered idly whether any of the crew aboard had the tendency of handling cold limbs with little to no reaction.

  Meanwhile, Hargreaves pressed on Moore’s solar plexus, trying to coax life back into the dead. The sounds coming out of his mouth were oddly broken. Every so often she would pull back the man’s wrinkly eyelids, or feel his nostrils for any sign of breath. Eventually she leaned back, sighing.

  “It’s no use,” the Inspector said. “He’s not responding at all. It couldn’t have been a few hours, but he feels days dead.”

  “Don’t just give up!” Rosa cried. “We still need him to show us how to stop Mordemere! Let me at him!”

  Before anyone could stop her, Rosa knelt, a long, thin stiletto clutched in her hand. What she intended, nobody knew. Everybody recoiled in horror the second she slit open Moore’s starchy linen shirt.

  “But that’s…” I heard myself utter helplessly.

  “Impossible…” gasped Hargreaves.

  “Wicked cool,” Rosa said.

  What lay before us were not the emaciated, gray ribs of a man aged into death. Everything below Jonah Moore’s sternum glittered a utilitarian bronze. Where there should have been intestines, liver, kidneys, and spleen, there were instead clicking gears, taut springs, and wetly gleaming India rubber, cleverly concealed beneath a translucent layer of woven metallic mesh. The metalwork was so fine it had deceived all of us into believing there was a living man flexing and breathing beneath the clothes. Of course, all was still now.

  “Has anyone seen this?” a weak voice asked from the doorway. We three turned, and there stood Elric Blair, as gray as Moore, holding up an unsealed envelope near the little writing desk by the door.

  “My fine rescuers,” I read, after Blair had given up the honor to slouch weakly on the bunk. “By the time you find this letter, the heartspring placed in roughly the liver analogue of my assembly will have run down, and I will have, in effect, become bereft of this world. Please forgive what damage was done to your fine ship in your attempts to reach me. I feared some curious or caring soul might attempt to gain entry in my last moments.” I glanced back at the doorknob before going on. It had been lashed to the bulkheads, but had come off when we opened the door. When I tripped the tumblers, the knob had simply fallen off.

  “Please do not try to resuscitate me. Your attempts will fail. Only Mordemere’s alchemic prowess supplied the necessary blend of aeon particulate and theurgy salts to keep me suspended between life and death. He called it a life compound, after your pirates’ lift compound. What bitter irony it is. Once one is tied into it, one may never live on without it. It is how he kept me in his service.”

  Rosa interrupted with a colorful curse, followed by one just as heartfelt from Hargreaves.

  “But that means he had already decided on his fate when he followed us,” said Blair.

  I gave them a moment to recover before reading more. “Valima Mordemere is insane. You recall we were the first to discover the legendary Laputian Leviathan, without which, according to legend, only the lift of natural gases is possible. I know not from where aeon stones originally come, but I have since discovered, through careful analysis of my own photogram evidence, that the Leviathan is a lie. The Leviathan is no flying city left by the ancients. It is like a storm where the attentions of human beings collect, and when the conditions are right, the aeon will show you wonderful things. But those mystic towers and endless galleries are a lie. The power of dreams is not the power of reality, however uplifting. Valima Mordemere must know this somewhere in his brilliant mind, but my efforts to return him to sanity have failed.”

  I shuffled to the next page, remembering the way the Chapman had felt, guiding my hand on its wheel. Could the aeons have given it life? Given it agency? I was a little sorry of leaving it back there, stuck in the machine city.

  “Mordemere has built his own version of the Leviathan, the dread ship Nidhogg, a fortress city. He does not realize he is chasing a dream using the reality. The Nidhogg is deathly powerful, carrying with it a Core that must be destroyed at any cost. Not only can it lift the landmarks of Europe, but it carries with it a secret that sickens me to my heartsprings. You will forgive me, but it is my hope the Core can be destroyed without revealing this dreadful secret. For you see, it is I who helped him build it.”

  Hargreaves gave a sound somewhere between a snort and a sniffle. She must have been thinking of Westminster. I paused, looking around to see if I should stop. But nobody complained, or dared to interrupt. This was essentially a man’s suicide note, and I was glad to surround myself with a crew who understood. A dead man had the right to speak, to pass judgment on the living.

  “Your Captain Samuel Clemens stole The Nidhogg’s guidance crystal, an artifact we collected from our first meeting with the Leviathan. Without this crystal, the Core is bereft of its true powers, and Mordemere cannot hope to find where the Leviathan is. Therein lies your one hope; you must find this crystal before Mordemere collects the landmarks he requires. Once Mordemere possesses five of the great focal points of the world, he will be able to track the crystal no matter where in the world it hides. Captain Clemens knows this, but he is unwilling to destroy the guidance crystal. Samuel Clemens hopes to use it for the betterment of mankind. It is also this secret that Mordemere will kill to protect.” I paused both to take a breath and to absorb the gravity of this.

  “He is like me. With eternal aeon energy, Valima Mordemere can live forever. Imagine an immortal man with the power to reshape nations, who fancies himself master of the world. He will be a delusional deity, whose indifference towards suffering you have already seen on the streets of Leyland.

  I leave you now with the necessary details to destroy Mordemere and his plans. Along with this letter, I have included schematics to both The Nidhogg and myself. Just above my heartspring, you will find three aeon crystal shards, much like the one Captain Clemens stole. These repr
esent three chances. Just one of these shards, introduced into the Core, will cause it to collapse and self-destruct. The stolen landmarks of Europe will float to Earth harmlessly. Mordemere may be insane, but he has always appreciated fine architecture.

  I thank you, my fine rescuers. You have given me a chance at redemption. Even if you simply ignore my pleas, I thank you for this last adventure. It has been the dream of my lifetime to sail aboard a true pirate dirigible.” I turned the paper to find a sheaf of intricate handwritten diagrams. “It’s signed ‘Jonah Moore, Repentant,’” I finished.

  Without further ado, I crossed to a speaking tube in the hallway and called for Cid Tanner. Everyone waited anxiously until the grizzled codger in the workman’s overalls came blustering into the room, crotchety and complaining of a disturbance in his work. The man had flown with Captain Sam. Even if seniority didn’t matter much to us pirates, I had grown up with him as sort of an Uncle figure. I instinctively moved out of his way. Cid picked up the diagrams.

  I had looked through the plans, but couldn’t make much sense of it. It seemed The Nidhogg was laid out like a top, with a long central shaft and a round disk section. Long gantries sprouted from the disk, reminding me of a giant squid. It looked like these long limbs wrapped around the stolen landmarks, incorporating them like pilot fish around the center of the ship. But that didn’t tell me how to get in, or, more importantly, how to take it down.

  “Well?” I asked, once Cid had shut up and read through the technical specifications.

  “Moore was one crafty bugger,” Cid remarked once he had finished. “We will need to detach the gantries here one by one, and the Core is in the middle of the ship, in the lower part of the disk, there. But it’s not impossible.”