Lands Beyond Box Set: Books 1 - 3

by Kin S. Law

  “Does Albion know you can do this?” Hargreaves wheezed, feeling her newly mobile appendage.

  “Know? He was there, hiding under a mahjong table,” I answered. “Now, pip-pip, let’s move. Blair, if you don’t mind?”

  “Oh…um…who is this, and where are her legs?”

  “Is that supposed to be an insult? Pip-pip indeed.”

  We managed to get up, with me leading the way. We worked our way across Red Square, now desolate save for the isolated pops of gunshots. Keeping the overturned military lorries and abandoned engines between us and any friendly fire, we found their way toward Albion. I hooted a few times, then tried a couple different species of birdcall, before Albion finally responded.

  “He’s really out of it,” I said. It was far too dangerous still to cross to where Albion was hunkered down behind a sedan engine.

  Besides, the air was rapidly thickening into an overdone pea soup. We were now in the cloud layer surrounding the Nidhogg. Remembering Jonah Moore’s schematics, I looked up to see a darker shape begin to emerge from the cloud. In a moment, the yellow stripes of an enormous gantry, like an airship all on its own, emerged from the layers of murk. It was lit by arclight bulbs Tesla would have given his right toe to claim his own. Immediately following its appearance, other familiar shapes began to emerge out of the mist. The Inspector’s good old Big Ben, intact and chiming away the hour appeared. A square, Romanesque construction in the near distance was the Brandenburg Gate. I could just make out the rounded dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, there in the stolen streets of the Vatican.

  “La Tour!” Cezette Louissaint cried, almost spilling out of my grasp.

  “No wonder it could not be harmed. The ship and all the landmarks are protected by gantries on all sides,” Hargreaves observed.

  “We saw something similar in the underground of Leyland,” Blair said. “The rounded apparatus provide the lift.”

  I saw where the Inspector was looking. An intricate cage of strong beams wrapped over and around each piece of stolen architecture. There were recognizable airship trappings, as well as the familiar anchor launchers and lift lines. But there were also the rounded machines indicated by Blair, as well as other more sinister devices. The scale of it was so large, it reminded me of nothing more than Mordemere’s own atelier back at Leyland. It seemed much like a gargantuan monster, holding the jewels of Europe in its tentacles.

  “He has his own city,” I murmured.

  “In the middle!” Blair pointed.

  The gantries had been arranged like spokes on a wheel around a single spire that rose higher than everything else. It soared high up over the “city.” Undoubtedly, this was where Mordemere was based, and where they would have to go to destroy what Jonah Moore had called the Core.

  “First we have to wrangle Albion,” I said. “Otherwise he’s going to put Captain Samuel over stopping Mordemere. He still has the Moore crystals!”

  “He’s already used two of the crystals Moore gave us,” Blair said. When both of the ladies gave him a hard stare, he added, “One was to save my life.”

  Blair quickly filled them in on what happened to the clanker sniper.

  “Right. There is still one shard remaining; there is still hope,” the Inspector declared.

  “What are we waiting for?” I asked. “All right. I’m the ranking officer on The Huckleberry, whatever that counts for. According to Moore, whatever Mordemere wants is dependent on this ship reaching the Laputian Leviathan. I say we split up. We’ll tackle the gantry release for each of the landmarks. Hopefully, without his prizes, this ship will never make it to the Leviathan.”

  “What about Captain Clemens?” A shot rocketing over their heads punctuated Hargreaves’ concern.

  Albion’s voice echoed over the square. “Why can’t I hit you?”

  “I don’t think he particularly cares right now,” I remarked. I didn’t like seeing Albion like this, but it was an Alby I had never handled. What could I do? What did he want?

  Besides, Albion could hit a nail in a door at five hundred paces. He was fighting the man who had taught him to shoot. They were well above her league. “We’ll tackle the Red Square gantry first, then split up to handle the others.”

  With a thud, everything shook around us. It seemed as if the Square had settled where Mordemere wanted it. Far overhead, a thin arm of metal hung suspended, studded with little round apparatus. Where the bridge had led onto a sheer drop, now it led onto a web of catwalks, as if they had been built to accommodate Red Square.

  Thankfully, Blair had held on to Cid’s schematic diagrams, scribbled on butcher paper. He was able to direct us into the labyrinth of catwalks. Cezette obligingly held the impromptu map up for him as he carried her over paths hanging over the gloom. The way led around the piece of stolen Moscow, and on the other side, strangely, hung the lush garden path that would lead to the Eiffel Tower, a soaring edifice that seemed to be bolted on to a specialized gantry. Lift lines ran out from it, I could not help but notice. What thoughts and memories were providing Mordemere succor?

  Blair led us around and under, using a utility stair. A moment of panic ensued. The steps dead-ended in empty air, with the raw bedrock of Red Square hanging over our heads. Then, without any warning, an entirely separate section of gantry rose out of the clouds below, clamping against the rock face with violently impacting bolts. Now the Square was securely sandwiched between two webs of metal.

  “This way!” Blair said, after he had recovered from nearly having his toes clipped.

  We hurried along, and in a moment discovered a control section boxed off from the exposed catwalks. It lay under the bulk of the Square, with thick, wire-enclosed glass at all sides and the floor positioned very near the center hub. From this cabin we could see the center spire extend down far below where it was exuding the mist to produce the ship’s protective cloud.

  “Like an airship bridge,” I remarked at the little booth. I recognized yaw, throttle, and other controls.

  It was relatively easy to figure out the separation sequence, not in the least because Cid had written them as if for idiots. I would have recognized them anyway, as the complex failsafe switches were nothing like any other airship. I double-checked the butcher paper anyway.

  “Here is the release lever. If you don’t want to fall hundreds of feet and splatter like a treacle tart, save it for last,” read one of Cid’s notes.

  Following his sarcastic notations, Elric Blair began to set the apparatus for ten minutes, on a flip-tab timer with a dial. The seconds immediately began ticking over with little clicks.

  “Gorgeous. That should be enough time for us to get to the other control cabins,” I said.

  “How will we get down from here?” Cezette asked, peering over the side where she had been set down on a bank of gauges. Her thighs showed from beneath Hargreaves’ coat, and the porcelain caps over her knees shone around the duller contact points in the middle.

  “We have a Morse lantern,” Hargreaves comforted her. She gestured to a pocket in her coat, where Cezette found a small tube with a folding crank. She toyed with it, producing a series of short and long flashes from the end. “Our ship will pick us up once we are done here.”

  “Is there anything you need from the Gray Man?” I asked.

  I exchanged a look with Hargreaves. Something about this hapless girl had caused us to cast our differences aside. It was funny how maternal instinct worked, even over a hardened lawwoman and a cutthroat pirate. Though, of course, I would never admit to possessing such a trait.

  “I feel…all right,” Cezette said. “I do not remember much, but I do not recall receiving anything more than plain food and water from the Gray Man.”

  “You’re a very perceptive child,” Blair commented as he checked over his work.

  “I spend much of my time watching,” Cezette admitted.

  Once Blair was done, he instructed the others on how to set the timer on the other cabins and relieved me of Cezett
e again. I took off to the right, while Blair and Hargreaves headed left. They would handle the Tower and Vatican apparatus, while I, being the fastest and unburdened by Cezette’s weight, would tackle the Gate and Westminster. We would meet on the opposite side, and take the Core together.

  I tried not to think of Albion, all alone up there with the specter of his past.

  “Let’s get going, gorgeous,” I said to the team. If Albion wasn’t there to lead them, then I would be.

  28

  Kowloon Walled City, or How Captain Sam Lost Albion

  With every shot fired, I knew my heart wasn’t in actually hitting Captain Sam. Neither were his shots anywhere close to me. That was the thing about the Steam Age; with all the aeons in the air, it was impossible to lie to oneself. They didn’t let me. The bullets curved away into the landscape, and into the empty sky.

  But how could I stop firing? I knew Captain Sam wouldn’t. This meeting was the entire reason why I had made the deal with Vanessa Hargreaves. Neither the captain nor I had come with the intent of stopping just before our goal. He had taught me to be the man I was. We were air pirates who showed with actions, not words.

  But now that the captain was right in front of me, I was reluctant to take the control crystal for myself. Every shot felt forced, and every puff of gun smoke made me think of cigar smoke. When Captain Sam would teach me to shoot, there on the decks of The ’Berry. It almost felt like the boy I had been was no longer the man I was. A different person. A different soul, who had experienced that past and was weighed down by it.

  But the man shooting his way through Red Square? At that moment I could think of nothing else than Rosa. Rosa’s soft skin, her lips, her fingers delicately juggling a crazy sharp knife. Her gentleness and her outfits.

  And, unbidden, my past came bubbling up before my eyes. The smell of chicken guano, and raw meat on hooks. The smell of fire and bay water. I fired once again and the veil of smoke brought me back to cavernous streets, a labyrinth without end.

  Deep in the dark, narrow passageways of Kowloon Walled City, the tiny, dripping nook of his home and his faceless family were all a Chinese boy could recall, and everything that mattered. The boy who would become Albion Clemens could hardly argue with his elders, who had contrived for him to live with food taken out of their own mouths. Even if they had to live like cockroaches, scurrying up and down and in between the lawless, continental plates of the walled city, feeding off the scraps and offal of the outside world, they would survive.

  Kowloon Walled City was located on the mainland, but Imperial Canton had never had the run of the place. The ancient seaside fort had been occupied turn by turn by invaders more numerous than the stars. Refugees, criminals, and characters of ill repute had besieged the old fort for centuries. When the last occupation returned to Nippon after the last Great War, syndicates and triads had taken over, instilling their own brand of bloody order. No single plot of land could hold all those Chinese, so the Chinese did what they did best–they improvised, building around the existing structures, filling in the alleys and cracks with their lives. Any space able to hold a living body did, and when those ran out, they simply built on top of one another, until the place became a towering monstrosity, a stinking shantytown like a giant black wart in sight of the prosperous, fragrant port of Hong Kong.

  The boy who would grow to be Albion Clemens had never known a life different from the place where he was born. It had begun in one of the best hospices of the Walled City, namely, a one-room brothel in the northern block, five levels over the Big Fortune meat bun shop. An old midwife had seen to his mother. The aged herbal healer doubled as Auntie for the five “chickens,” or prostitutes, who worked out of the room.

  He was the last of eight children, born to parents who had run from the occupation in Shanghai. To hear his ancestral history, they were the last descendants of Han dynasty royalty, but practically every Chinese could lay claim to something of the like. The boy’s given name had been an auspicious one, made to avoid the ire of celestial bodies loving nothing more than to strike down those with aspirations. It literally meant “small, unimportant dog.”

  It might seem odd for a child of eleven to recall such things, but being born in a Chinese family, the boy was lectured five times a day. At first, he heard them on this mother’s back, or his sisters, when they could be spared, but as soon as he could waddle the family made him follow at their skirt hems. They carried him on cloth thongs, bobbing around as they got their daily tasks done.

  They would climb over sheet metal awnings, through rusted, cramped holes, and across narrow bridges hanging with other peoples’ laundry. The bare planks often dangled over twenty stories of dark shafts. Stories were defined only loosely by windows and ledges. The multitude of square hovels and shacks became an interminable wall, one atop another like shelves in a cabinet. A misstep would take a person through exposed, rusted beams and the awnings of noodle shops below. The boy had often peered down into them, or up at a square piece of sky, wondering if he fell in them whether there was any ground at the bottom at all.

  Sunlight was nigh unknown deep in the Walled City. Sometimes the family would gather on the prime real estate of rooftops crowded with gardens, and have a simple supper in the smog-tinted sunset. Albion would later recall those moments fondly, of dangling his legs over the edge of the City and flinging bits of blackened leftovers down to the sparrows and monkeys clinging to its cliff-like walls.

  His father worked as a seller of delicacies. They caught and raised quails for eggs, used in glutinous rice wraps, or lo mai gai. The tiny, grape-sized eggs were sweet and delicious, and far too good for the family to eat themselves, or so his father always claimed. With the money from the eggs they bought hardy rice, and mustard greens, and the occasional bit of fish when there were a few coins left over. Sometimes the triad collectors felt a little generous.

  The boy started delivering the eggs alone at five. His scrawny, emaciated form was perfect for wriggling through the narrow passages, the blind crawlspaces between buildings left by feng sui purposes or shoddy construction. The climate of Kowloon left black, viscous grime on everything. It was a product of the factory soot and wetness. It wasn’t unheard of for one of the impromptu dwellings to collapse on themselves, or go tumbling end over end into the cavernous shafts of the Walled City. After the first time he protested, his tears useless in the face of his father’s fists, he dove into those passages willingly.

  Sometimes he would stop and peer through the gaps of bricks, or pasteboard walls rotted by the constant drip from the dwellings overhead. What he saw confused his childish mind, at first, but privacy was as nonexistent as the plumbing in the Walled City. There was always a partition to peer through, or a ledge to cling to. Closed doors might as well have been silk screens. An adulterer and adulteress coupling, the rats in the pork buns, or the slick red floor of a syndicate execution, nothing was hidden. After the first few times watching, the boy was convinced his family had the right of it.

  Survive.

  Keep your head down, do your job. Pay back your debts. Survive.

  His horror cemented by the evidence of his own eyes, there was no reason to live any other way. The boy listened, and repeated back the legacy of his elders. After all, the word of an elder was law. There might be a dearth of schooling, there in the dark abysses of the Walled City, but some Confucian values remained. They weren’t complete animals.

  When the boy, exhausted by days straight of work running up and down the City, slipped and fell on the quail cage, he never questioned what the consequences would be. His trueborn father commanded him to recover the birds, and the boy hastened to comply, scrabbling after every mouse hole and dog shack they squawked their way into. There had been one hundred and eighty-four birds. By the end of the day, the boy’s keen nose had sniffed out one hundred and forty-two of them. His blood had scarcely quelled under the herbal poultice on his leg where the red wire of the cage had scratched him.

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nbsp; “What? You want to sleep? Where are the other forty-two?” His father inquired of him. His mother and sisters looked on, their faces buried in sewing. Hanging up greens for drying over his bed. His bed was hardly more than a straw mat on a hard board, but the boy had desperately wanted to climb onto it.

  Albion Clemens, eleven years old, turned and made his way under the dripping eaves of their familial nook. Its dankness and closeness then reminded an older Albion of the stone graves they visited, in the hills not far from the Walled City.

  Twenty of the birds had found their way into the grain stores of a big row restaurant, down on the fifth level. Thankfully the owner was large and slept like a pig. His chickens were trying to kill the quail, pecking at the trespassers to their territory through a wire cage. The boy was able to gather the small birds into his big woven barrel without waking the owner. His hands came away dotted with blood. Another five he found in a smoky opium den. The quail moved sluggishly there, but the dwellers in the smoke grasped for his hands as if they could drag him into their addled dreams. Yet another six found their way up onto the rooftop, where a garden of young white carrots furnished them a rich midnight snack.

  Though the Walled City offered little schooling, his father had been diligent in teaching him sums. Their family abacus was well-worn. There were Dao masters in the City who taught the ancient way of maths on the segments of the fingers. By the boy’s count, there were eleven birds left. Albion had no clue where they could be.

  Desperate, tired, and stinking of the runoff of a million families living in the Walled City, the boy grew desperate. He started to think about all the places those stupid, ugly birds could have tumbled into. He had covered every accessible route, every crawlspace he could fit into. He knew where the nooks and crannies all went. The obvious place was, of course a place the boy had never been.

  Pulling along his basket of fluttering, rollicking quails, he made his way over the thin planks and ledges, to the farthest edge of the Walled City. The darkness made the journey easier. In the daytime it was too hard to put his sandals down on the planks over the deep wells between improvised dwellings. In the dark, he could pretend they were sturdy, celestial bridges leading to some saintly grove.