Lands Beyond Box Set: Books 1 - 3

by Kin S. Law

  I knew what would come next.

  Like Mordemere said, even a blind man should be able to hit at this distance, but I was not blind. I was a seeing, resourceful air pirate, and when I saw Mordemere begin to aim his weapon, I didn’t even need to think about moving. I simply reached for the closest object, the marble bust of Aristotle, and flung it at Valima Mordemere.

  “Bollocks,” Mordemere said, as if he’d scorched himself on beans and toast.

  The man’s silvery weapon discharged a blue streak like profanity given fire and life, arcing through the air. It struck the bust of Aristotle and detonated it with a pop, filling the room with a great cloud of powdered marble and a smell of burning copper.

  “Crikey that’s nasty,” I remarked. My goggles, though cracked, shielded me from the dust.

  “There you are,” said Mordemere, whirling about. There was too much stone dust in the air, and it was in his eyes. They screwed up like a crying baby’s.

  “There’s the difference between a wailing child latched on to his betters, and someone willing to carry through his dreams, Mordemere,” I continued to say. I allowed myself this one luxury. Once the deed was done, there was no telling what would happen. “The latter is prepared.”

  Mordemere finally cleared his vision, wielding his terrible lightning weapon again, but it was too late. True to his word, in the aeon-rich environment of The Nidhogg, all it took was something to focus intent. I pulled the trigger of the Red Special. The bullet seemed to slow between the ticks of the clock. It traversed the breadth of the room as if on a rail, entering the crystal at its heart with a tinkling crash.

  And chaos ensued.

  I sensed the ship lurching all about me as loose objects freed of their moorings flew about. Insect dioramas, rare paintings, and fine tomes floated in a soup of vintage liquors and alchemic potions. Some of it splashed onto the elaborate control panels, sending up arclight sparks. Others collided into each other, fizzing and exploding in minute flames. I felt something plow into my shoulder, and when I touched there, I found something hard embedded into my shoulder. Warm blood stained my hand. Then I was thrown away from the dais, rolling and scrabbling, by the force of a sudden explosion.

  “You fool! You blasted fool!” Mordemere’s voice echoed after me.

  His neat suit had been ripped in four places, and there was gold glittering beneath. The alchemist could not get up. His steamwork limbs had been thrown akimbo, jerking uncontrollably from the aeon explosion.

  “Far too dramatic; this is why we don’t let people monologue. I thought you wanted a conversation? Don’t ask if you don’t like my reply!” I yelled back before staggering out of a sudden opening in the walls. I vaguely saw it was the obelisk doors, thrown open and jerking back and forth on chaotic cogs.

  Life draining from my body, strength gone from my limbs, Victoria and Red both emptied and barely stowed, I honestly thought it was over. So much for the Scourge of Shanghai, the Corsair Chinois, the Manchu Marauder. I had never even set foot in Shanghai. The name was a slur. With all the raids I had been on, all the Robin Hood adventures, the best crew in the world, was this how I was to end? Bleeding to death thousands of feet over Europe?

  Cheap picture house melodrama. I had thought seeing my life flash before my eyes was a myth. Cid Tanner, Auntie, and Alex, of course, who cared so much for The Huckleberry’s Captain they would safeguard his son—adoptive or no—from his own folly. Vanessa Hargreaves so full of fire and loyalty, true to the last to Queen and Country. Elric Blair, even, the pointless idiot, sacrificing himself for the truth. What was truth in the face of Earth-shattering, overpowering might? Rosa Marija danced into view, as she oft did in the evenings, all beauty and grace and lack of compromise. I regretted not taking her up. Wasn’t it the pirate way to chuck out the rules and do what we wanted? Rosa deserved better. Finally, Captain Sam swam into view, through a familiar fog of cigar smoke. He seemed to waver, then solidify, walking through the fog of smoke and slapping me clean across the cheek.

  “The hell are you doing, you danged stupid boy?” he yelled in my face.

  “Captain?” I blurted, shocked. Confusion, love, and murder warred somewhere between strained lungs. “How…?”

  “None other,” Captain Sam drawled, seemingly unconcerned. “Just look around.”

  We were no longer in Mordemere’s anteroom at the peak of The Nidhogg. Warm wood, tea smells, and comfortable worn cushions surrounded us. It was Auntie’s galley on The ’Berry.

  “I see. I guess when you die, this is what happens,” I sighed, earning another roundhouse slap. It stung like the devil.

  “Keep talking like that and you will be, boy,” Captain Sam said, lighting up another cigar. “You hurt, means you’re still alive. Not for long, just for now, until your brain succumbs to lack of air, now the ship’s gone haywire. Funny, an air pirate suffocating to death.”

  “So you’re not really the captain,” I said, disappointed. “What happens now?”

  “I’m real enough. What do you think happens? It’s your own damn mind, make it up.”

  “I really wanted to find you, and beat the tar out of you.”

  “What made you stop and take on this fool’s errand, then?” the captain asked. “You ought to have followed me when I left this devil ship.”

  “Don’t rightly know. Obligation, maybe?”

  “Right enough.”

  “I guess…I thought it was what you would have done. Not the Sam you showed me, but the one you show other people. You were always going out of your way to help.”

  “Ever think I just did them things because I wanted to?”

  “It’s the only reason to do anything.” I smiled. “I’m all right. I can die knowing I did what I thought made a difference. We all chose to be pirates, in the end, just doing whatever we wanted. It makes no difference now.”

  “Why in the blue blazes not?”

  “Why not? I’m bleeding to death, and with the ship not working, the lifts are shot. There’s no other way down. My only way out is if The ’Berry flies up to this window, and she can’t hardly make it this high.”

  “You’re a damn pirate, ain’t ya? Nobody ever comes to a pirate’s rescue. Figure it out yourself!”

  The anteroom with its Chesterfields and brocade came back into view. There was a faint sound of something smashing its way down the hall, Mordemere, most likely, making the most of his machine limbs. The floor seemed tilted, a fact I initially attributed to the blood streaming down my arm, but it wasn’t. The sky looked wrong outside. I caught sight of a regal clock face staring him in the eyes. Big Ben, not a hundred yards away. Then it passed as we drifted higher.

  “Captain Sam? I’m sorry I kicked you off your own ship.”

  But the captain was no longer there.

  I pushed myself up on something which turned out to be my old, dented cutlass. It was more of a prop than anything else. The blade was good for cutting lines on ships, and scaring deckhands. I hadn’t thought of it as a weapon, more as a tool…maybe it still was.

  With a mighty roar, I summoned up the last of my strength. Just as the shark-like pattern of Mordemere’s suit reappeared in the anteroom, I charged the French doors, tall, floor-to-ceiling pieces of glass that likely cost more than I could steal in a month. My cutlass handle made a convenient focal point, shattering the glass into a million pieces. Then I was outside, in the thin air, sliding down the slanted spire of The Nidhogg by the seat of my trousers. My buckles caught and sparked yellow, spinning me round and round as I struggled to find some purchase on the slick spire.

  “Albion!”

  I barely heard the voice, like the sweetest mirage. Yet I reacted, driving my cutlass deep into the side of the tower. The metal scrabbled and slipped, then the point caught in some crevice and stuck. It flexed, terrifyingly, and then I found himself hanging over slate clouds, clutching my sword in both hands, boots braced against the swiftly tilting airship.

  “Oh my God! Captain Clemens!”
Hargreaves’ voice came from close by, then the more familiar one I had first caught, Rosa. Two sooty heads emerged from a window far above me. They retracted, and after a minute, they reappeared, now just above. I had been sliding just over some stairwell at the side of the spire where my friends were climbing.

  “Come on then!”

  “Blair, put Cezette down and help us!”

  They manhandled me into a window, where we nearly all tumbled right down the stair. Then we were all together, all four of us again, staring into each other’s eyes in shock and relief.

  “Alby?” Rosa appeared in my vision.

  I blinked blankly at her, then looked down where her bustle was torn in a very suggestive place. She jiggled obligingly, like she usually did, and developed an expression of wanton abandonment, like she usually did. Only this time, I reached out, grabbed her by the waist, and pulled her to me. I kissed her deeply, drinking of her sweet mocha like a man in the midst of caffeine withdrawal.

  “You smell rank,” I commented, coming up for air. “Where have you been?”

  “Shut up, gorgeous,” she said, and stifled her pirate’s airway once more.

  33

  Leviathan

  Hargreaves

  As it turned out, Rosa didn’t have long to enjoy her newfound triumph. The Nidhogg was still breaking up around us, venting steam in unlikely places, developing seams where there had been only impenetrable bulkhead before. Once Rosa extracted the shrapnel embedded in Albion’s shoulder I hastily tied it up in a sling. One of us would not have been enough. It took both my Yard field medicine training and Rosa’s stock of painkillers to halt the bleeding. As soon as he was patched up to the extent of our ability we dashed headlong down the stairs, heedless of bustles in disarray and skirts in tatters.

  Meanwhile, it seemed like Cezette Louissaint was feeling a hundred percent better. I could not help but notice her recovery coincided with the vast explosion we had heard, just before Albion had come flying in out of the blue. Cezette had put her head together with Blair, inspecting Moore’s schematics of this strange airship. By the time Rosa and I bound up Albion, we had a plan.

  “We head to ze cargo hold, here,” Cezette explained, pointing. Her accent became more pronounced with her excitement.

  Rosa and Albion looked at each other pointedly.

  “Oh no,” I interjected. “You’re not getting another pirate. She’s coming with me after this; we’ll sort her out at the Yard.”

  “Aww!” the pirates groaned as one.

  “You two are sickening,” Blair said, smiling.

  The hold was at the bottom of the ship, and easy to find. We simply needed to head straight down the stairway. The catch was, the air was beginning to become thinner and thinner, and the light increasingly brilliant, folding in and around them in shades of Caribbean clear and Atlantic navy. The ship was still rising, despite the major malfunctions shuddering all about them.

  Still carrying Cezette, Blair wheezed, “What the blazes is going on?” The girl made things harder by pointing emphatically where we needed to go.

  “The Leviathan’s been summoned. I don’t think it can be gotten rid of so easily!” Albion hollered.

  “How do you know? What’s happened to Mordemere?” I seized on the opportunity to interrogate. “Just keep going! Mordemere isn’t going to be a problem,” Albion reassured us. He was still clutching his cutlass tight, and that was answer enough for me.

  We made it down to the bottom, in spite of rivets clattering loose all around us. At the last unceremoniously kicked-down door, we found a vast room of naked steel beams hanging over empty space. As we watched, a section of flooring juddered loose from the supports, sliding down, down, flipping over and over into the clouds. The cargo area was gone, or going, and there was nowhere for us to gain a footing.

  “Now what?”

  “Ze Morse lantern!” Cezette squealed. “We use eet now!”

  “That’s right!” I said. I held it up, along with my snuffbox communicator. “We can signal The Gwain with these!”

  “The Gwain?” Cezette inquired.

  Her head tilted just like a cat’s. It was really quite cute, I thought. But when I opened the cap to the Morse lantern, it was only to groan. Glass spilled out of the gadget in a shower of disappointment. My communicator seemed to be whole. When I flicked the toggles, the sending position was only a squeal of painful static.

  I switched it over to listening, and yelled desperately into it to no avail. All I had was a stream of confusing sounds that resolved into the hubbub of an airship bridge during battle. The Gwain! So close, yet so far. I listened as Arturo’s voice came over the ether. As promised, he was aboard as a signal operator. His regular voice halted, and I gasped as I heard Her Majesty issue commands.

  “Captain, are we in range?” the Queen asked.

  “Yes, Your Majesty. The Gwain is prepared for ramming speed, but I must protest. With your august personage aboard, I am unwilling to undertake such a risky strategy.” It was Captain Leeds! I could just see his mustachioed English face. Magnificent. Then the full import of his words hit me like a freight train.

  “Christ, they’re about to ram us!” I cried.

  “Luckily,” Blair mentioned, as everyone stared at the the lantern bits falling out of my hands. “Morse was a brilliant inventor. The codes can be communicated by sound, as well.”

  “We’re a mile up in the bleeding sky! No chuffing way—” I protested. I knew The Gwain had a thick alloy chassis, tipped with a figurehead of pure steel. There was no way The Nidhogg would hold together.

  “There’s a way,” Albion interrupted. “I have a feeling…but I’m going to need everybody’s help!”

  Meanwhile, my snuffbox cut out with a static clatter, then came back on with Her Majesty’s voice again. “Commence the attack!” the Queen ordered.

  “Bloody shit,” I said.

  34

  The Present Is Always a Gift

  Hargreaves

  Looking back on it, I thought it might have been a very strange sight indeed. On the ship, they had no idea our escape coincided with Queen Victoria’s attack on The Nidhogg. Later, I got the horrific nitty-gritty from a propaganda crew working a moving-picture machine on The Percival.

  The moment the ram punched through Mordemere’s creation, I was still biting the bullet. Specifically, the one I had used to tap against one of the main structural supports of The Nidhogg. According to Cezette and Moore’s schematics, the steel beam ran right through the Core, and up the whole spire. I had been skeptical, and still was, but I was the only one who had any real practice with a Morse lantern aside from Albion, and he was still weak.

  “You have to concentrate!” Rosa yelled. “Unless you mean it, the aeons won’t respond!”

  “I don’t believe this!” I wanted to say, but I knew that was the point. If I didn’t, it wouldn’t work. The aeon impurities in Albion’s bullet, retrieved from the Victoria, wouldn’t resonate if I didn’t feel the genuine need to be saved. For the fiercely independent Inspector in me, it was comparable to career suicide.

  Meanwhile the great, long shape of The Gwain lined herself up, her screws spinning furiously. The Percival and The Baba Yaga—last surviving Muscovite Balaenopteron—began bombarding the invincible Nidhogg. Only this time, their shots were unhampered by protective measures and stolen landmarks. Ammunition rocketed into the tentacle arms of the gantries, ripping through them like a whale through a squid. The oddly geometric patterns of light beginning to form around The Nidhogg were no protection, even when they flared into red shapes around the flaming rounds. Noise tore the skies, shrapnel fell in great, mountainous quantities, and the melted slag was reportedly smelt all the way in Geneva.

  Then, as the flames licked the very body of The Nidhogg, the spire housing Mordemere’s chambers and the nefarious Core, The Gwain struck. At full speed, the ship bearing the name of one of the noble knights of England sallied forth, her shield arcing as enemy weaponry t
urned it red-hot. Yet it was enough, for The Gwain thundered into the body of The Nidhogg, tearing it asunder as a noble lance might the carapace of a fell drake.

  The Nidhogg sank and she rose, as well, for the severed portion containing Mordemere’s study flew doggedly upward, drifting further and further up. It drew a strand of debris along, like the cut head of an insect, trailing entrails. The majority of the evil machine disintegrated on the spot, in a fantastic burst of light. It was like a turquoise starburst in the sky.

  If anybody saw four tiny figures, one weighed down by a lump on its back, fall from the wreckage, it went unremarked amongst the crew of The Gwain in its report of the incident later. Even if it were possible to separate shrapnel from flesh, what were four casualties amongst the millions Mordemere would have inflicted on the world? Certainly not a soul noticed the dark, bulbous shape flitting daringly into the rain of metal, diving like an eagle, then slowly drifting back up and out of danger. What kind of madman might attempt a rescue in midair? Like picking a feather out of a bundle of falling arrows. Some things were just too impossible, even for the worst kind of penny dreadful.

  “So that was it then? The whole story?” Her Majesty Queen Victoria III asked me later, in the sunlit beauty of Her Majesty’s private tea parlor.

  The greenhouse windows looked down on a London just flowering in the early spring growth, matching the Queen’s verdant sundress. I might have picked out Arturo’s idling Eleanor below, if I wished. I did not.