Lands Beyond Box Set: Books 1 - 3

by Kin S. Law

  “Come to me. Come to me…” murmured Albion. He seemed not to hear his lover’s call.

  Impossibly, something was happening around the pirate captain’s body. There was a sort of bluish glow that gathered around a soft spot at his shoulder. His good arm was raised in its black sleeve, his coat billowing out behind him. Pointing the Red Special up, he held it for a moment and the glow suddenly intensified. Starlight whirled around the pirate Captain as if drawn to him, and the air hummed with energy, as if each brilliant point was a fairy singing to the man who had summoned them into the world. Motes of light appeared like moths, drawn to the gun that was no longer a gun. Now it was a beacon, and there could only be one thing it was calling.

  “Now!” Albion cried, and pulled the trigger. “Come to me!”

  At once the gun exploded in a brilliance like a supernova, and the entire court was filled with blue light. It was hard to look through it, but in that light something was coming, something that fell from the heavens, cracking the smooth corporate pavement of the court. When the light faded, Dragonwell was kneeling there in a massive crater, with one fist in the ground, ready to receive his captain. Beat-up, battle-scarred Dragonwell, his bones showing, looking more like a scurvy-ridden sea pirate than ever. At his back he held the sword A Contrario, and every one of its seven wings stood open, outlined in the blue glow of the blade.

  Now at the foot of the Ubique tower the glow was scintillating, a galaxy contained in the depths of Dragonwell’s gears. Silhouettes shone through the splintered armor: the straight telegraph pole of a femur, the buttressing lattice of the rib cage, big triangles of joint cups notched like nautical sextants. Albion turned toward Rosa, one foot aboard Dragonwell’s outstretched hand. He mouthed something, and he smiled, a warm embrace that traveled the distance of the court. It would have traveled the world.

  “Albion?” whispered Rosa, in awe, but in the next blue flash, both Albion and Dragonwell were gone, leaving only a blue streak arching up into the sky.

  Station 20

  Peace

  Later, not a single person would agree on exactly what it was that happened over the city of San Francisco. With pieces of something indescribably horrid raining upon them, it was a small wonder they did not look to the heavens for salvation. What glimpses of the Worm writhing in its bondage turned into stories of an impossible serpent, a demonic force, a clockwork dragon. Even the pirates, gathered later at the pubs, burlesques and dirty underground saloons could never find a story they agreed on, so like a myth or a legend, the thing grew arms and fangs and extra heads, becoming more and more deformed until no one could be sure what had happened.

  What everyone could agree on was that it had brought peace to the hills of their city.

  As best as they could piece together, something had come from Downtown and risen up to meet the horror in the sky. No one on the ground knew for sure, but they could all feel the doom that would occur if the horror was allowed to touch down. They held their loved ones close, even though the armed men insisted on herding them away. They must have known their hopes now rested on the blue speck flitting back and forth above their eyes. There was no communication between the pirates and the mercenaries, but they all stopped at once, and they stood, an anxious audience to the theater above.

  Witnesses reported a blue streak grasping the nose of the horror. Differences in opinion always escalated at this point. Some said the shape was small, just a man ascending like an angel, to answer the prayers of the poor sods on the ground. Some said it was a horror itself, an old god from the depths of the ether come to rectify its confederate. The old pirates mostly agreed it was some sort of Gear, and that it had worn the badge of the Incognito: the skull and bones of the Jolly Roger, the grinning mask and the eyepatch of their swashbuckling forebears.

  Whether or not this was true, ever after the airship pirates enjoyed a certain respect amongst all who tread the skies. Patrols let them off lightly, hardly a one was ever hanged, and some said merchants gave away their wares cheerfully when boarded, though that was likely mischief, without a grain of truth. The suspicious amongst the audiences considered perhaps this was a story cooked up by the Incognito, intended to further the ease of highwaymen antics in the skies. But the practice of gibbeting was banned on most shores, that much was true. It was a pretty good story, and it wasn’t below the Incognito to bend the truth in their favor.

  “Balderdash. I’ll tell you the secret of the Incognito,” Gunsmoke Gilly would say, if the story was told in his presence. He’d lost an ear in the Battle of the Bay, which he had covered with a feathered headpiece. It lent him a presence some described as “dashing.” Rosa called it “bumptious,” “cocky,” and on happy occasions, “preening.” If allowed, Gunsmoke would continue to talk.

  “There isn’t any inner circle of Incognito. There aren’t any secret coffers on any deserted island, no barrels of jewels in the depths of the Straight Hook. Nobody making up stories to be spread like the clap. No, the Incognito were always a volunteer organization. Enough people work together and they can do just about anything. Democracy in its purest form, straight from the teat. You want something? Do something. That’s why the story goes on. That’s why it can never be killed, because everyone wants to hear it told that way.”

  Gunsmoke’s ranting wouldn’t stop the storytellers. They would go on to illustrate how the good ship Huckleberry finally gave out, its screw spewing smoke and flame instead of steam, toppling aside and falling like a stone. They would sing of how the blue streak at the Worm’s face thickened then, deepening in color as the figure deep inside girded his loins, or whatever gods and machines do to prepare themselves. Like a comet in the twilight sky, a portent of something no one quite understood, its tail reached from the heavens to the Earth, and pushed the horror back up, as if it had said, in a great bellowing cry:

  “No. Not this day, nor any other day!”

  And others would throw empty bottles of grog at the bard, laughing and jeering at this melodrama. Or sometimes full bottles, if they thought he had told it in a particularly rousing way. But the queer thing was most of the bards did tell it this way, and each more dramatically than the last despite the broken glass. Their hats were full of coin, excellent liniment for their hurt brows.

  Some bards claimed they saw the Gear crumbling deep inside the blue streak. They saw its arms and legs come apart under the titanic forces at work, until all that was left was the shadow of a man with his hands clenched tight around a shining blue point, like the unbearably bright part of the sun.

  And then it vanished.

  The comet, the figure, and most of all the enormous horrible “thing” hanging in the air over them was simply gone. It disappeared without pomp, without celebration, perhaps in a final burst of cerulean that could have been added by an addled old pirate, baiting an audience to keep his back teeth afloat. All they knew was the danger was gone, and the skies clear and the proper color once more. The stars were out, and how beautiful they were, the constellations peeking from behind the silhouettes of the airships. Suddenly the world seemed to enlarge, to puff up from held breath exhaled from a million mouths.

  Suddenly everything that had seemed impossible was, for an inscrutable reason, possible.

  Still, the thing that stumped the bards and the pirates and the storytellers was this:

  What had become of the captain of that fateful ship Huckleberry? He who might have given a firsthand account of the whole thing was nowhere to be found. Had he been the one inside the blue streak? Had he perished in the flaming comet? Even his crew could not be persuaded to answer, and the beautiful, golden-haired pirate who had commanded from the ’Berry was even more tight-lipped than most.

  What had happened to the Manchu Marauder, Albion Clemens?

  Terminus

  Maple Cross

  “Tell me about Maple Cross,” said Rosa Marija.

  She’d found Hargreaves sitting on a stone in the midst of the finally quieted triage, in
the ruins of the city. Nothing more than a collapsed school in what had been the richer part of San Francisco, the place had filled from midnight to noon the day after the battle. Treated patients were replaced by new ones in a stream of wounded that kept Hargreaves elbow-deep in field dressings. Until just now, when someone handed the sweating, dark-eyed Hargreaves a drink and made her sit down.

  High above, Cezette, Prissy Jack, and Alice Hanson still ferried supplies in to treat the wounded. Bandages and ampoules arrived daisy-chained from airship to airship from as far as Tacoma, Santa Fe, and Nevada. From the settlements beyond the gray veil of the Lands Beyond that could hear the call came stranger remedies, potent salves and tonics saved for the critical case patients. From those ephemeral places came glowing wands that mended bone with a pass, and artifice skeletons that clipped on over a person’s broken body, holding it up while the flesh healed. The Lands Beyond was mysterious and dangerous, Hargreaves felt, but the people in them probably no different from herself: they offered help to those who needed it.

  But for now, the task of healing was better left to those fresh and unscarred by what had happened. Rosa and Hargreaves had a moment to themselves, and a bottle of wine between them with a cloth across the broken neck, to catch the glass.

  “Well?” said Rosa.

  “Maple Cross,” said Hargreaves. “Why not? It was dashed stupid of me to mention it.”

  They propped two chairs together high on the roof of the school, and watched the nurses go from patient to patient in splotched aprons, significantly less hectic than before. Most of the black ichor had been hosed down by fire engines, and the streets were even beginning to look, if not clean, at least cleared. Lorries could pass unobstructed, and their rumbling recalled the long trip Vanessa Hargreaves had taken across America.

  “Maple Cross was a mistake, I see that now,” said Hargreaves.

  She was too tired to be anything but honest. Her fingers shook as she poured down the wine, and she felt swampy under her linens. Unattractive, but it felt like good, honest sweat. “At the time I was torn between duty and…maternal feeling I suppose. Some peasant weakness, I thought, some inability to let my betters dictate proper station.” But even this was a dodge, a way of avoiding the problem. Rosa did not push, and they sat there, passing the bottle back and forth. After perhaps two minutes, Hargreaves spoke again.

  “It was a ship full of all kinds of people. Young, old, boys, girls. But mostly it was the girls,” began Hargreaves. Rosa tensed, but said nothing.

  “Some as young as nine, others nearly women. All sorts. They were to stock the brothels from Shetland to St. Agnes. The gang who held them was ruthless, but the raid had been planned for months, and we managed to arrest them without losing constables. The gang had picked the hideout for easy airship landings, but that meant they had nowhere to run when we sprung the trap. Open country. All in all it was a feather in the cap for a detective inspector fresh from academy, her pips still squeaky clean.”

  “But?” prompted Rosa.

  “But, some uppity-up decided it was too much expense for Her Majesty’s government to house five hundred mouths and tamp two hundred quims once a month. Something had to be done. Someone had to pay for it. So those girls were put to work in the asylums, in Bedlam and Hanwell and Marylebone. Scrubbing, cooking, and resented for being a drain on the country. Getting beaten and shoved into closets for the night. Working their fingers to the bone. Blinded by dim sculleries lit with guttering tapers, instead of by schoolbooks. Nobody raped them; too many witnesses. But if the girls said anything, asked for anything different, they would be thrown into the cells, and accused of hysteria, or madness, or worse. Easy enough for an asylum. The abuse would still happen, only with straps cutting their wrists bloody.”

  “And you had to sign the order.”

  “No. I was the poster child of the raid. When I found out, it was only by the grace of God and an accusatory article in the London Times. My head was full of the good of the country. Everybody has their station, each cog their place. But there was no excuse. I knew what institutions are. All that sanitary green, boiling pots of lye, the bloodied bedclothes and flung feces.”

  “Oh my gods. Maple Cross was an asylum.”

  “They put me in after my parents died in the carriage collision when I was six. It’s why I’m so good undercover, you see? Learn what the doctors and the orderlies want to hear, and you can pass for anything, even sane. They put me in Maple Cross Asylum for the Mentally Disturbed. That was the institution I was in for two years. I went back there, when I read the article five months after the raid, to see the women sentenced to that hell. That day, two of those girls had stolen bottles of strychnine. Downed them together in a back room.”

  “I’m not going to tell you there was nothing to be done,” said Rosa, her face implacable. “And I don’t think going back to Maple Cross was a mistake.”

  “You don’t have to,” said Hargreaves. “I watched the shame cross the faces of everyone who worked at Maple Cross as they carted out the bodies of the girls. In many ways I think going mad would have been kinder. But I didn’t go mad. I have lived with the memory of it all these years.”

  “You decided to be a champion for them. You wanted to rise to a position where you could do some good,” said Rosa.

  “No. That was the person I was pretending to be. Maple Cross was where six-year old Vanessa Hargreaves pretended to be someone else. I tried so hard that I think I actually became one of them for a while. Walked around with faith in Queen and Country stitched to my collar. But soon enough someone in that world goes into a back room and drinks enough poison to turn blue, because it’s not a proper world, Rosa. Maple Cross taught me what the world is under all the rules and propriety I lived so hard to uphold. It’s an asylum, Rosa. You can only get yourself out.”

  “Is that what you want? To be like us pirates, fighting tooth and nail to be outside the tide of dying mayflies, trying to live the way we want by sheer force of will?”

  “That’s people, isn’t it? That’s the aeon. It’s in the ether, the wave-front of the species inflicting its will across the Earth. Like Hallow’s host, consuming everything…but giving back, too, building things in nature’s place. And you pirates, you jump in and out of that current and let it take you where you need to go. I bet if you went to Mars and attempted to ascend on an airship it would be impossible. Simply impossible.”

  “No people.”

  “No desire.”

  In truth she’d known this revelation only when one of the surviving Lillenthal Dragoons alighted nearby the triage and handed her an ether dague, bejeweled and carved with the arms of the House of Hanover. The crystal of his ether dague was protected from the wet with parchment and oilskin.

  Once unwrapped, Her Majesty’s voice was carried from signal crystal to signal crystal, buoyed across an entire world. There were sounds in the background, heartrendingly familiar. The clink of a cup on a saucer, the clip-clop of hansoms in Soho, drifting in through Her Majesty’s conservatory. The sounds of home. In an abandoned schoolroom above the triage, the Queen’s final lesson rumbled into Hargreaves’ ear.

  “Ma’am,” Hargreaves said. Her lips were parched, difficult to move.

  “Hello, Vanessa,” said Victoria the Third. “Congratulations on completing my mission. Good show, my clever friend. Was the sword to your liking?”

  “It was quite adequate to the task, Your Majesty,” managed Hargreaves. She nearly choked on the next word. “But…”

  “At this point, I’ve no reason to hide anything from you.”

  Hargreaves swallowed.

  “It was you, wasn’t it? What happened to Jean Hallow’s host?”

  The Queen fell silent. Hargreaves said nothing.

  “I told you about Doctor Snow, Hargreaves,” answered Her Majesty after a moment’s hesitation. “When we had Mordemere and Hallow build an engine of flesh and steel, all those years ago, it was in the hopes of freeing ourselves from coal
and peat. Of relying on foreign peoples in far-off colonies to feed us and clothe us. Paying them in modern conventions and modern debts…”

  “You didn’t trust Hallow,” said Hargreaves, not letting herself be swept up in rhetoric.

  “Naturally, I devised a contingency. A pox to stop his engine dead.”

  “It was a mistake,” allowed the Queen, with hardly a break to breathe. “We should have known the cost of such an engine, but we were foolish. Not even Valima Mordemere realized the obvious: any artifice of flesh must subsist on flesh. But Hallow knew, and he embraced the darkness.”

  Hargreaves drew in a long breath.

  “Mordemere’s final solution, in the grips of madness, was to build a factory of limitless flesh,” continued the Queen. She was speaking of the Nidhogg now, the false Leviathan. “A flying city, endlessly working to churn out more bodies to feed into the hopper.”

  “And Hallow’s?”

  “I suspect to change the nature of flesh altogether.”

  “Beg pardon?” said Hargreaves, confused.

  “Hallow was a sodomite. Such a creature abhors women, has no use for women. There is potential in his research for certain barbaric applications…to usurp woman’s proper place in creation. But happily, we shall never know what they are.”

  Hargreaves did not think so. Actually, she thought the Queen sounded far too biased. Hallow’s closest confidant, the Orb Weaver, was a woman. Even now Vera Jasper wore the scars of their partnership without complaint. Hallow had taught Cezette, a girl-child, faithfully, without bias or dark doings. And, most of all, until his betrayal, he had been a trusted companion of Hargreaves herself.

  Rather, Hargreaves thought, Jean Hallow had been driven to madness because of a world run by normal men and women. People who would happily throw their fellows into the meat grinder so their streets would look a bit neater. Such things had been around before Hallow and would go on after him. Jean Hallow had merely sought to turn the machine against its masters.