Steampunk World

by Sarah Hans (ed)

  “You’re my first lady and ever will be. Her Highness would be merely the junior spouse.”

  In Mathieu Dubois’ Jeen-style house there is redwood furniture, backdrops of nielloware dragons on painted skies, and western watercolors. Leather-bound books with gold lettering Ging can’t read, a map pinned to the wall charting a demarcation of territories Siam has ceded to Farangset.

  And five dead farang men on the ink-stained, paper-strewn floorboards.

  “They’re just unconscious,” Aunrampha says, nodding at the automata. They stand by a shelf, quietly ornamental. Blank masks for faces, limbs of braided rattan for strength and flexibility, hands of wood and brass, razor fingers.

  Ging stares as Aunrampha turns out the men’s pockets, removes their belts, rifles through their clothes. She discards their weapons: knives for fighting and knives for eating, foreign currencies crumpled and clinking. Firearms. Sabers. “Ah.” Aunrampha holds up envelopes, wax-sealed and held together with a knot of twine. “Anna’s. I’ll explain later. Can you take to the balcony? You can watch through the window.”

  Not without reservation, Ging obliges, and only because she knows the automata are better protectors than she can ever be. Aunrampha steps away from the bodies and begins making tea. The fragrance of jasmine does not conceal the miasma of blood.

  When Mathieu Dubois comes he has his saber drawn: the broken lock has made a surprise impossible. When he sees Aunrampha he gives pause, his fist momentarily slack on the grip of his blade. He snaps out a string of noises, rapid-fire.

  Aunrampha smiles up at him. “Monsieur Dubois, I do not speak French. You run errands for an Englishwoman. Unless I know nothing about her at all, I’ll wager she doesn’t condescend to discourse in your tongue.”

  The farang does not let go of his weapon.

  “Why don’t we sit down and share tea? The leaves are yours. I didn’t have time to poison them.”

  “You’ve harmed soldiers of France. For that there will be consequences.” Mathieu sheathes the saber, unholsters a pistol. He does it with smooth ease, and when he points the muzzle at Aunrampha his hand is steady.

  Aunrampha waves the envelopes at the farang. “These were handed to you freely, not stolen. Whatever drives you to do favors for Madame Leonowens I don’t really care, but imagine the ambassador’s disappointment to learn that one of his trusted spies consorts with an Englishwoman. He’ll be just so hurt.”

  “You overstep yourself. It’s nothing to us to scorch your houses and salt your land as we’ve done to Vietnam.”

  “Monsieur.” Aunrampha sips her tea. “Put your silly gun away. Yours is inferior, incidentally. Have you tried Chinese ones? They’re works of art, and their firesmiths don’t sell just to anyone. I’ve heard it said they grind dragon whiskers into gunpowder and sheathe the barrel in kirin scales. Truth or hyperbole, quality speaks for itself.” When the man doesn’t lower his pistol she says in Thai, “Break his arm.”

  The dolls obey; the dolls are quick. This much Ging knows. They have practiced, Aunrampha giving them commands to sit or stand, move this way or that, like dogs. They are built for strength and speed, animated by a secret alchemy. A man, even farang, even the agent of a mighty empire—he is only flesh and fat, cartilage and tendons.

  A crack of bone; a surprising lack of blood.

  He hangs slack between rattan hands, pale and panting.

  “Monsieur.” Aunrampha pours herself another cup. “It is true there are consequences to any act of provocation. Bringing you to trial and tribunal is not an option. In the open your punishment would be no graver than if you’d committed petty theft, for you are of France. But here that will not suffice; here I am your judge, and I hope you’re as dedicated to the virtue of justice as I am.”

  * * *

  Aunrampha has the Farangset men disposed of afterward. Their bodies will be buried deep, their belongings incinerated. Clothes stripped, faces mutilated beyond recognition. She does not take chances.

  When Aunrampha returns, she spreads Anna Leonowens’ letters out, holds down the corners with inkwells. “This isn’t one of Anna’s silly correspondences. There’s more than just the usual that she doesn’t want intercepted by palace staff.”

  “What is the usual?”

  “Tales of how His Majesty whips palace slaves raw, of how he summons little girls to his bed.”

  Ging flinches. “Is any of it true?”

  “He’s talked of emancipating the slaves, to the collective displeasure of his ministers. As for the girls… if he did that, I would know. I’d be obliged to silence, but I would know.” Aunrampha passes a hand over her face, rubbing at her eyes. “Anna’s petty retaliation for his refusal to grant her more power than she already wields. I read an earlier letter that said His Majesty wanted to make her a concubine. She, being a virtuous woman under the grace of Yesu Christ, naturally spurned him. Doubtless that makes her quite the sensation among friends and family in Angrit.”

  “What is the point?”

  “Convincing her superiors and social circles that we’re barbarians living under the reign of an insane, lecherous tyrant. It’s a fable that has its uses, for them.” Aunrampha pats out the creases on the letters. “Read these.”

  Ging does, falteringly, straining to decipher the twisting spidery script. “But this is—”

  “A confirmation that the Angrit empire is no friend of ours and will leave us to Farangset mercy should it come to conflict. That Farangset, once they’re done with Yuan and Kampucha, will turn their gaze to us. The assassination attempt was a prelude, of sorts, to destabilize His Majesty’s reign. It’ll be some time in coming.” Aunrampha rubs her hand against the tight skirt of her gipao. “In five years or twenty. Nevertheless it will come.”

  * * *

  The hour has grown much too late, lit with lamplight that jaundices packed earth and pavement. They walk arm in arm down the dock where Ging’s wheelboat is moored. On her knees and weary for no real reason, Ging pours oil into one of the boat’s receptacles and adds a precise amount of solution. Her own adapted formula mixing her teacher’s and that of Jeen firecrackers. It hisses, flaring blue; boat actuators whir into motion.

  An amber flicker in the distance, against a night as deep as it is damp. It takes too long for them to understand what it is.

  When they arrive the workshop is smoke and ruin, scorched roof-boards floating in the waters, pieces of the veranda trapped among duckweeds and upriver refuse. Shards of pottery and glass on the steps leading to the house, stains of Ging’s pastes and pigments on the wood.

  They find Nok by a window.

  She must have tried to escape. Blackened fingers curl over the sill, caught under a fallen beam. The rest of her is hidden, but from a scrap of bright orange pha-nung it can be no one else.

  “I only thought," Ging says distantly, staring at that hand, “to have someone look after the shop. That’s all. She was going to visit her temple siblings.”

  The first drops of a late-summer rain. Where they touch the wreck of her house the wood sizzles and cracks. Each of Ging’s muscles tenses; she wants to reach out, to be in motion, to do what she does not know. Aunrampha is holding her steady, but she isn’t shaking, isn’t collapsing. She feels nothing at all, as if her heart has guttered out.

  Footsteps on wet mulch. The snap and rustle of a parasol opening. From beneath its shade Anna Leonowens peers at them. “An unfortunate night.”

  Ging looks at the Angrit, a heat unfurling in her that turns to ice. “You murdered a child.”

  “Did I? An odd conclusion to make, on little evidence save that I’ve passed by. If a child is dead, my condolences. Lady Panthapiyot, how interesting to see you about at this hour. Your mother would be… put out, let alone to hear that you’re attired and painted like a Chinese whore. So loosely are girls raised in this country. Spare the rod, spoil the child—you could’ve benefited from a boarding school, a Christian education.”

  “Leonowens.” Aunrampha s
teps between Ging and Anna. “You are not untouchable.”

  “Siamese as a lot are ungrateful. Your kingdom, such as it is, stands sovereign on the sufferance of Britain.” The woman shrugs, a farang gesture. “I’ll leave you to your matter. I suppose there’ll be cremation and much heathen noise made by bald men in orange robes.”

  She lifts her skirts slightly, her boots squelching on puddles. The parasol she hands to a gaunt yellow-headed man. Her carriage bears the emblem of the Angrit embassy. It rumbles away under the crack of a whip, a spray of mud and rainwater in its wake.

  “I'll have justice," Ging says to the quiet that carriage and governess have left behind. The rain tastes of bitter salt, as though it’s passed through ashes.

  “Ging, I can’t remove her. Not right now.”

  She takes a breath and grips Aunrampha’s hand, treasuring the solidity and warmth of it, and brings it to her chest. “I don’t mean that; I don’t mean her. She’s nothing, less than nothing. I’m making the automata too slowly. Give me a factory and I'll turn out hundreds in a year. Find me machines for welding and molding and I'll make them from the hardest steel. Pick me clockwork artisans you trust and I'll create little ones with gunpowder hearts.”

  Later Ging climbs what remains of the stairs, her feet light on boards gone to cinders. She surveys the smashed pestle and pots, the broken distillers, the burnt papers—though none of them would contain the formulae that live only in her head. Aunrampha is close at her back, a touch always on her, and that is what keeps her from exhaling screams. They do not talk.

  They shift the fallen beam away and loosen Nok’s blackened limbs as best they can. Burned skin sloughs off her and the smell is unthinkable, the contortion of her impossible. She is almost weightless when Ging takes her up, swaddling her in a cotton sheet that has survived the arson.

  At dawn, caked in soot and smelling of filth, they find a phiksuni at a small temple. She does not ask questions. The funeral is attended by two.

  * * *

  Ging is twenty-nine when malaria claims His Majesty. Before the year’s end Prince Chulalongkorn has assumed the throne. Anna Leonowens is long gone, home in Angrit no worse for the wear. Her dismissal is not public knowledge and she spreads fiction of an amiable parting with the royal household.

  Ging is thirty-four when Kampucha ceases to be a kingdom.

  It comes as no surprise. The Yuan by that point isn’t much of a sovereignty—has not been for a long time. She hears some exult that Siam’s enemies fall one by one: Yuan, Phma, Kampucha finally. Aunrampha’s brows knit tighter every day. They have moments together but those become fewer, briefer, and Ging does not sleep most nights.

  There are two factories.

  They have made a thousand and two hundred dolls, and nearly twice as many bombers: crude clockwork dolls, each bearing an explosive charge. Five of them are enough to sink a ship.

  * * *

  Ging is sixty-four, Aunrampha sixty, and there are Farangset gunboats in the harbors of Bangkok. Each cannon in the palace’s direction, poised to fire.

  There are six thousand automata, and twelve thousand small bombers. Ging whispers them a command at night.

  Their march is utterly silent.

  Tangi a te ruru / The cry of the morepork

  Pip Ballantine

  Manuwatu Gorge, New Zealand

  September 1873

  The man lying face up in the rain at the bottom of the gorge looked surprised. Agent Aroha Murphy, looking down at his broken body, shared that very emotion, though hers was tinged with the bitterness of disappointment. The cloak of thick bush around them and the rush of the Manawatu River made it seem like a far too pretty place for the man to have breathed his last—even in the pouring rain. Allen Henderson was a liar, a thief, and should have been dead years ago. However, it should have been at Aroha’s hand.

  As water filled his damnable eyes, she ground her teeth to hold back a scream of outrage at the unfairness of fate. She had been hunting Henderson for years after the attack on the farmhouse that had ended with her sister Emma dead, and her mother quite lost to her senses. Perhaps I should feel more relieved, she thought to herself, but damn it, I wanted to end him.

  After a long few minutes, James Childs, the constable at her side, cleared his throat. He was trying to gallantly hold the umbrella over her head, but he was having some difficulty keeping his footing in the growing mud of the riverbank.

  “Agent Murphy?” he asked softly, and that was enough to snap Aroha out of her contemplation.

  She was here, she recalled, not as a wronged party, but as an agent of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences, and she had a job to do.

  Aroha poked Henderson with her foot, rolling him over onto his face, and then bent down to examine his back.

  “I can’t see any wounds apart from that from the fall,” she commented, pursing her lips. “I couldn’t think of a man less likely to commit suicide than Henderson.” She pointed up the hill to the path where carts and carriages made their perilous way along the side of the mountain between Ashhurst and Woodville. Her Maori kin had named the gorge Te Apiti, the Narrow Passage, and it was well deserved, for at any time a landslide could take out the fragile road. It was, however, not the cause of Henderson’s plunge down to the river because the road was intact.

  She looked up, her brown eyes focusing on Constable Childs. “You say this isn’t the only one last night?”

  The young man ran his fingers through his ginger hair and glanced at his damp regulation issue notebook. “Indeed, Marie Lafayette, Tommy Ring, Hemi Hudson, and two others that we don’t know of down by where the river exits the gorge.”

  “And the moon last night was full?”

  Childs nodded. “A huge one.”

  “Not all of them could have accidentally walked off the road on the same night,” Aroha muttered to herself. She already knew she was on the right track, so she just had to find the culprit. That task sat poorly with her though, given the identity of one of the ‘victims’.

  “It’s very strange,” Childs replied, “but it was lucky you were in the area, Agent Murphy.”

  “Yes,” she said examining the towering hills and bush around them. “Lucky indeed.” She didn’t dare tell him the Ministry had sent her chasing after a string of similar suicides up and down the North Island. The Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences did not have a large office in New Zealand, so resources were spread very thin, and she was pretty much it for the lower half of the North Island.

  The wars with the Maori were still fresh in people’s minds, and the Imperial forces had only just left the shores of Aotearoa. Still, because of her heritage, Aroha could move more easily around the countryside than most agents.

  However, it was probably her dark skin and strange dress that had this young local policeman nervous. He was about to get a lot more so in a moment. She was sick of explaining herself to the locals. Lately she had given up telling them all about her airship captain Ngati Toa father, and her Italian mother, so she let her outfit speak for itself. Aroha might wear pakeha male clothing for ease of use, but she also had draped over her shoulder her father’s kahu huruhuru. She had received the highly valued cloak, which contained the highly sought-after kereru feathers, as some kind of recompense from him for not taking her into the tribe. He already had a fine Ngati Toa wife, after all.

  She wore the cloak not because it was his, but because it came from her ancestors, and that still meant a great deal to her.

  Swinging down her backpack and placing it carefully on the ground, Aroha began to unpack the equipment she’d been hauling around since she’d left Rotorua three weeks ago.

  She pulled out a small brass box, and attached to it a needle-thin rod, and to that a white sail-like shape about the size of her spread hand.

  Constable Childs couldn’t help leaning down to see what she was doing. “That looks…”

  “…delicate,” Aroha interrupted, worried the enthusiastic policeman might start p
oking at it in the way of men.

  “What is it?”

  She let out a sigh. “It’s an aether tracker. A brand new device just shipped in from the London office last month.”

  Childs nodded as if he had a clue what she was talking about, and now she knew his eyes were fixed on the moko kauae that was carved proudly on her chin. The marks made her lips a dark blue, and decorated her chin with the curves and spirals she was entitled to. It was a declaration of her mana, her rank, and her past. She was proud of it, but she knew many others just didn’t understand why she would mark her face.

  The policeman was earnest but clueless, so Aroha smiled at him as she explained something he might be able to grasp. “The tracker is an extension of what my ancestors were very good at, but instead of following tracks in the bush we can follow the emissions of anything beyond the normal.”

  “You mean ghosts?” Childs whispered, going even paler.

  That such things existed had always been accepted by her father’s people, but pakeha tended to become a little unhinged if they came near to the truth.

  “No,” she said, as she began to turn the small crank on the side of the tracker, “ghosts do not exist Constable Childs…” she added under her breath, “…at least not here.”

  The small receiver on the top flicked back and forth, and narrow tape of paper chugged out from the side. After examining it, Aroha let out an exasperated breath. “The signal is too weak. Show me where you think the body fell.”

  Constable Childs gestured to two local men who were waiting some distance away from them, and they hustled up to carry Henderson away before he spoiled the beauty of the spot with his rotting corpse.

  Aroha watched dispassionately as they did their work. It felt odd to know someone else had stolen her vengeance. Her father’s ancestors believed firmly in utu, the concept that all must be kept in balance with kindness or vengeance depending on the action. Her mother’s ancestors had also believed in an eye for an eye. Apparently both sets of ancestors would not be satisfied this day.