Steamscape Page 2

  “But, Jing–”

  The mechanic’s grip was like a crushing vice. “Now, Cylinder.”

  Smith sidestepped Drina and materialized in front of the teenager. He smiled stiffly and held out the circular puzzle box. “Please.”

  “Don’t.” Drina’s hand shot out, trying to intercept.

  But the girl had already reached out. She lifted the stunning puzzle into her fingertips.

  It disintegrated into its individual cogs and springs. Gears shot up past her nose and ears, and the numerals clanged loudly as they bounced off the floor.

  “Oh!” Solindra cried, but stopped short of an apology. She stared at what had been left behind, glowing on her fingertips.

  Smith chuckled, instantly chilling Solindra’s wonder. The man in black smirked and then erupted into a neighing laugh. “A vessel!”

  Chapter Two

  “In all of Steamscape…” Solindra lifted up the glowing blue device that had fallen from the puzzle box to eye level. It took the form of a pre-civilization thunder deity’s hammer, but it looked to the girl like a double-bended fishing hook. Patterns and endless knots swirled with an inner light deep inside the hammer, and they sparkled and moved whenever she tilted the device.

  “A vessel!” Smith’s neighing laugh didn’t quit. “How long has it been?”

  Solindra dropped the glowing device in surprise. It chimed like a bell when it crashed on the floor.

  “Cyl!” Jing jerked her away and they plunged into the crowd. “Drina!”

  The cook nodded. She jumped up and over the bar counter and jerked on a hidden lever underneath it. Holes snapped open throughout the steampipes across the ceiling, releasing a cloud of vapor into the room. Smith disappeared into the sizzling mist.

  Solindra reflexively ducked underneath the descending steam. It was hot, but not scalding by the time it descended closer to the floor.

  “What’s going on?” she screamed. Other surprised shouts exploded around them and she clapped her hands over her ears.

  The mechanic guided her out the door. He pointed up the mountain to the thin trail that led to the little pocket they had nicknamed the Garden. He swung wide to his workshop and came back out with two shovels. “Go!”

  Overhead, lightning flashed. Thunder bounced around the mountain peaks.

  Solindra tripped over her skirt on the narrow steps worn into the mountain. She held out her hands, scratching them on the stone as she rebounded off the granite. “Jing?”

  “Go, child!”

  She hitched up her dress with her free hand and kept climbing. They wound their way up through the trail’s narrow turns. As they ascended, the sounds of the Pitchstone’s chaos began to fade.

  They rounded the final turn into the Garden, a natural bowl filled with a clump of aspen. It also contained a trickling stream lined with smooth stones, some radiantly green grass and Mark Canon’s grave. On top of it, Jing had let out a small pipe to breathe steam continuously over Mark’s special steamflowers. Their petals remained open almost all spring and summer on the grave.

  Jing had made the tombstone from an old engine’s steam whistle marked with Canon’s favorite saying, veritas temporalis est. Truth is temporary.

  The mechanic stopped in front of the marker and bowed his head. “I’m sorry, old friend.”

  He handed Solindra a shovel.

  She dropped it. Her face paled as she looked between the shovel and the grave. “I… I don’t understand.”

  Jing sighed and looked away. “Sorry, Cylinder, but these are your old man’s instructions.”

  “To, to…” She backed into the granite wall. She looked everywhere: the trees, the storm clouds flashing, the walls of the garden – everywhere but the grave.

  The mechanic scooped up her shovel and held it out to her again. “He well and truly wanted to be buried with this secret.”

  “But why? Why now?”

  He closed his eyes. “He said that if either of us ever saw such a puzzle box again that we would all have to know.”

  “Again? But I’ve never seen one before!”

  “He kept this away from you all your life.” He thrust the head of his shovel deep into the dirt. “Now dig.”

  Solindra, trembling with fear and rage, slammed her eyes closed against the sight of the flying shovel. “No!” She gritted her teeth and covered her ears again, trying to block out the sound of moving soil. Thunder boomed, causing the freshly loosened dirt to slide toward her boots.

  “Solindra Canon!”

  She flinched – she’d never heard Jing snap before, nor could she remember the last time he’d used her given name. She rubbed her eyes. She didn’t know what to do.

  Numbly, she curled her fingers around the handle of her shovel and followed Jing’s lead. She had always followed the three of them.

  She remembered when she, Drina and Jing had buried her father. She didn’t know if she’d been crying harder then or now. Only the lightning illuminated their actions.

  “We’ve all had to do things that we hated ourselves for doing,” she recalled her father saying one morning as she sat on his lap. Mark had been supervising her as she had transcribed the telegraph. She had learned the dots and dashes when she’d learned her letters. It had been the first time he’d let her transcribe one by herself.

  “We each had to do things, but it was for the highest good.” A scowl weighed down on his brow, causing his brown eyes to narrow and his dark hair to slide forward across his forehead. “Or so we were told.” A new smile washed away the brief darkness. “Little Cylinder, we always have to face what we don’t want to. Face it, and it will have no hold on you.”

  “I don’t understand,” she had said, so long ago.

  Solindra tossed a shovelful of dirt behind her. Her tears blurred her vision too much for her to see what she was doing clearly. Time also blurred. She knew she was moving down and was soon working in a hole. Suddenly, the shovel’s edge cracked against wood, thudding to a stop against the coffin’s lid.

  “No!” She yanked up on the handle.

  Jing set his shovel aside and offered a hand to help her climb out of the hole. Then he turned his back and smashed the shovel through the lid, splintering the wood.

  Solindra kneeled at the edge of the hole, helplessly staring. The mechanic reached down and removed the large fragments of wood.

  She covered her eyes, but she’d seen enough. Two years of burial had not been kind to Mark Canon. The only father Solindra had ever known was well into becoming part of the earth again. The bottom of the coffin had rotted away.

  She slammed her eyelids down, but the scent knocked her back. It wasn’t strong, not after two years, but the echo of the smell of decayed meat was still there, clawing its way up her nose. But through the nasal cacophony there was just a hint of what Mark had smelled like when he had been alive.

  Jing reached down and wrestled an identical puzzle box from his friend’s skeletal hand. He bowed his head. “I’m sorry that it came to this. I know that you had expected to be here.”

  “Daddy…” Solindra whispered.

  Jing brushed the accumulated dirt from the box’s raised, typeset numerals and ancient letters. He passed it to Solindra and when it touched her fingers, it cracked apart like Smith’s had before. It released another stylized hammer, this one red and glowing.

  Jing leaned against his shovel. “It’s called a sancta, if I remember eavesdropped conversations correctly. Put it in your pocket, that’s right. Now let’s cover him up, Cyl.”

  She nodded, trying to gasp out something and failing. The shovel seemed to float on its own accord as she pushed the dirt back into place. The tears dripped off her nose to mix into the soil, just as they had done two years prior.

  They were just patting down the grave down when Drina, breathless, rounded the corner into the Garden. “I lost Smith in the crowd.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Jing replied. “We got it.”

  Drina nodded. “Good.�
� She looked back to the rusting steam whistle poking up out of the ground. “Goodbye, old friend.” She looked up at Jing and Solindra. “It’s ready. I’ve got all the cargo, including our weapons and even our old uniforms.”

  “Weapons? Uniforms?” Solindra started shaking her head. “But my father wasn’t a soldier. He worked on ships his whole life before he settled down to build the waystation. He told me that, so he couldn’t have been a soldier.”

  Drina and Jing both hesitated.

  The teenager repeated louder, “My father wasn’t a soldier!”

  Jing started to limp toward the path. “No time, Cylinder.”

  Drina grabbed the girl’s shoulders and steered her away from their secret garden. “Everything soon, Cyl, I promise. Even the secrets your father had buried with him. But for there to be time in which to explain everything, we have to leave.”

  “What? Leave? Leave the mountain?”

  “Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?” The cook pulled her toward the trail.

  “Not like this!” Solindra bounced off the rock wall, stinging her shoulder.

  “Too bad.”

  “Drina,” Jing sighed.

  They hustled down the thin steps around the mountainside toward the air-dock. A small engine pumped hydrogen into the waystation’s emergency air-dinghy. The sky-boat had only been used a couple of times that Solindra could recall and she’d never been on it no matter how much she’d pleaded.

  Jing ran his fingers over their emergency airboat’s little coal-fired engine props on the dinghy’s tail. He had built the engine and the boilerbox too. He had made them so they recycled the water of the steam that powered the propellers so the boat wasn’t weighed down with excess water.

  Jing’s boots pounded on the wood as he approached the air-dinghy, barely big enough for four people. The pliable bubble hissed as its sides bloated. A cargo box had been latched to the bottom of the craft.

  Solindra eyed the dials on the hydrogen tanks’ gauges. Those were Pitchstone’s most expensive possessions, since they were the hardest to replace in the mountains.

  “We can’t leave.” She backed up toward the edge of the dock. “We can’t leave.”

  Jing and Drina glanced at her, but the cook went over to the hydrogen tanks and Jing tossed another bag into the dinghy.

  “All my things are in my room!” When they didn’t respond, she waved her hand at the lightning and clouds. “And we can’t fly in this!”

  “Yes, we will,” Drina replied coolly.

  Jing paused at a large lever on the edge of the platform. The ornate brass-and-copper handle seemed out of place, away in its own little corner of the dock.

  “Drina, it’s fifteen years old, but I know my work.”

  The cook’s chocolate eyes widened briefly. Then she shrugged. “There are lots of travelers in there, but okay.”

  “Never stopped us before.” But his fingers slackened and he pulled them away from the untouched handle. “But we can’t blame it on orders anymore.”

  “What?” Solindra stared at the dinghy as she watched the dirigible’s bubble bloat. She looked back down to the lights of her home. “Wait! Where’s Calvin?”

  “He’ll be fine.” Drina pushed the girl toward the airboat. Jing fired up the propeller.

  The cook helped the younger woman sit near the stern. Solindra gripped the side with white knuckles. The craft wobbled as Jing hacked clean the ropes. The hose broke free from the balloon, hissing and writhing against the platform since no one was there to shut off the tanks. The balloon’s valve closed, and they hovered in the storm’s darkness over the waystation.

  “But where can we go?” Solindra gulped.

  Drina pointed. “Valhasse. We’ll get some information and supplies, and then we’ll head for the frontier. Maybe beyond Steamscape itself.”

  “Barbarian lands?” Jing grinned. “Been a while.”

  Solindra squeezed her knees together and bit her lip. She peeked over the side. Lightning lit up the walls of the mountain, throwing blinding whiteness and deep shadows across her vision. She scrunched her eyes closed and huddled down against the deck, staring at the cook’s boots. “Drina, I think I hate sky-sailing.”

  Chapter Three

  “Crypter! Yer a crypter!” The greasy little man hauled on Theo’s wrist, trying to spin him about. Theo just stiffened and planted his feet.

  “What? No! Piss off, old-timer!” The nineteen-year-old set his teeth and shook his arm. His hair was a light brown, but the grease had stained it darker, so that it matched the color of his eyes. He eyed the constables down the street, but they hadn’t seemed to notice. Then again, even if they did, he wondered if they’d care. Two dirty workers fighting in the street was nothing rare in Valhasse, especially since the start of the mass conscriptions.

  He glared down at the street dweller. Then again, the constables might yell at them just to prove what scum they thought the workers were. Let the machines break their limbs instead, he’d overheard last night in the guardhouse.

  Exactly where he wasn’t supposed to be, and now he was attracting exactly the eyes he wanted to avoid.

  “Crypter! Crypter!” The old man danced in place, roaring. He pointed at Theo’s chest and cackled in triumph.

  “Just a bricoleur.” Theo turned and marched away.

  “Bricoleurs are crypters!” the man snapped like a whip.

  And it stung because there was truth in that. Almost all of the tribes of itinerant machinists and smiths did boast fortune-telling powers through the ghosts in the steam. So-called polite people ostracized them for it, but their bricolage arts made them useful, and they could make just about anything from whatever scrap happened to be littering the floor.

  Theo’s gloved hand went to his chest, where he’d felt the swing of a tiny counterweight. His old necklace had slipped out. It was only an old brass coin he’d drilled a hole through. It was worthless, but it was the only thing of home that had survived the fires.

  It certainly wasn’t a cipher medallion like the crypters were always hunting, whatever those were. How did those fringe fanatics expect to communicate with the ghosts in the steam through jewelry anyway? Not to mention their secret order, the Priory or whatever it was called, that ruled them all supposedly. He yawned before he finished the thought.

  He spat, “I’m just another man pounding out drums for the war machine.”

  The old man tugged at his gloves. “Then why ain’t you–?”

  “Shove off!” Theo swung away and walked down the next block, rounded a corner and took off sprinting down an alley.

  He pulled around another corner and pressed his back against the wall, listening. No hasty footsteps echoed off the brick walls anywhere near him.

  A steam whistle screamed from the nearby train yards. Theo flinched and wished he didn’t know what those calls meant. He breathed, trying to slow his heart. Maybe it wasn’t that train. After all, Valhasse’s traffic had increased tenfold since the start of the war. Maybe it was just a regular cattle car or something.

  He shaded his eyes from the blackened ash that choked the entire city. Smokestacks and boiler towers had been thrown up against any old warehouse-cum-factory now. He coughed out some of the ash into his glove.

  Turning up his collar, Theo walked out of the alley into the droves of people floating down the avenue. Everyone wore black or brown, or rather, all their clothes had been stained black and brown, and they let themselves be dragged along by the crowd.

  That icy, calculating part of Theo’s mind pointed out that it was possible to slip by unnoticed as he focused on his target. He ground his back teeth. He hated when his inner voice that spoke that way, but it did make life easier…

  Before the war, Codic had paid Steampower to do almost all of its manufacturing, so now they were hurting to learn to bend metal again. The capital owned thousands of war machines on paper, but Steampower had stopped deliveries well before they launched their attack.

 
; That meant that these poor bastards lost their limbs and lives churning out weapons and machines.

  Another day, another atrocity.

  Well, today some workers might get a break. Theo smirked to himself as he sauntered toward the boiler tower. He didn’t dare raise his eyes to it though.

  This boiler had been constructed inside the decaying remnants of an ancient castle. Only the keep had remained after the centuries, and even that was half crumbled. The shiny, newer tower rose up through it in stark contrast, resting thirty feet higher than the old stones. This boiler was one of a dozen around the city’s industrial zone, now in operation all day and night.

  If the city was a body, these points would be various hearts, pumping out the lifeblood steam to all of the factories and driving their conveyor belts and machines. Of course, smaller heating substations were everywhere, but those were really just fires to keep the steam active, and the ghosts happy.

  Theo leaned his back against the old castle wall. He rubbed his shoulders between the blocks. They felt smooth and worn by the ages. He pulled on his cap and slid seamlessly into a line of downcast workers dragging their feet into the boiler tower for their perilous shift.

  He kept his eyes pointed at the floor and shuffled inside. A soldier shoved his shoulder with a rifle butt, but Theo just rolled with it and kept on walking.

  While the men trudged on toward the furnace, Theo slipped out of line and started to circle alongside the central pillar of the boiler. He hopped onto a thin metal line of stairs and moved up to a catwalk.

  With his back pressed against the stones, he put his boots against the metal central pillar and started to walk his feet horizontally up the wall.

  After a couple of minutes, he could feel the heat through the soles of his boots. He’d coated them with ceramic plating, rubber and thick leather too. He tried not to imagine the thousands of boiling gallons on the other side of the metal. His protections might not be enough.

  Theo wiped his sweaty forehead, and it dripped freely off his glove. He frowned at the steel plate in front of him. Some worker had drawn the Hexagon before this panel had been placed. Theo guessed he must’ve been scared of something.