Blood and Steam (The Tinkerer's Daughter)

by Jamie Sedgwick

  Over the years, the Vangars had replaced the airships’ wooden hulls with steel framing. From this foundation, the sky-city had grown into a structure that all but defied the principles of physics. The city was shaped like a diamond. Tall buildings thrust up from the middle of the deck, their towers pressing forebodingly into the clouds, thousands of massive black balloons stretching across the sky overhead. Likewise, the sprawling structure had grown downward, each successive level slightly smaller than the last so that the level above could support the extra weight.

  Without Blackrock steel, none of it would have been possible. The Vangars had mastered the steel and found ways to utilize its unique strengths. The Vangars’ experiments with Blackrock steel had paid off in many ways and this architectural masterpiece was a major one. They used similar processes to make thin-walled plate metal and tubes out of copper and brass. With these scientific advances, the Vangars had created a city that was beautiful and ominous all at once. I could only marvel at it as we floated up to the docking bay and tethered our airship.

  To the left and right I saw runways for planes and gyros, and directly ahead a massive landing bay for the Vangar dragon ships and dirigibles. Gas lanterns flickered here and there in the darkness, marking the runways for incoming flights. The rest of the main deck was more or less the same, with runways and landing bays along the periphery, and at least a dozen tall buildings rising up from the center.

  I found a strange beauty to the scene. The simplicity of the design was elegant in its own way, the shining metal walls almost surreal against the starry sky, and I found it hard to look away. When the gangplank was ready, Wulvine unchained me and took me into the city. I almost forgot the pain in my arm as he guided me across the busy landing area and through a large set of doors into a hangar-like building filled with airships and gyros.

  My head was spinning as I took it all in. I tried to absorb everything, the layout of the place, the exits and tunnels and stairwells, but ultimately I was just gawking. I couldn’t wrap my head around this massive thing, this city floating in the sky. I was awestruck as we entered the darkened hangar. Even now, in the middle of the night, the place was a cacophony of grinding metal and machinery. Mechanics were hard at work building, repairing, and creating. They never rested it seemed, and no wonder. How else could they maintain that city day and night, without ever touching the ground!

  It was here that I saw Vangar women for the first time. In all of my life, no female Vangar had ever set foot in Avenston. Some people joked that they had no women, that they didn’t like them, but we knew better. The Vangars often sated their carnal appetites by stealing young human women off the street, never to be seen again. I had heard many horror stories about such things. The Vangars had taken an interest in me a few times, but I always turned out to be more of a challenge than they’d expected. Many young women were not so lucky.

  The Vangar women were not as tall or fearsome as their mates, but they were nonetheless impressive. Of the dozen or more that I saw, they all stood head and shoulders over any human woman, myself included. Like the men, they had strong chiseled features and many had light blonde or red hair. I noticed that they seemed to have free rein of the ship, and that they were treated more or less as equals. This seemed strange to me, that the Vangars could so readily enslave an entire kingdom and yet treat their own kind so nobly. It was my first glimpse into the psyche of this strange, conflicted race.

  Wulvine led the way down several tunnels and flights of stairs until we entered a dungeon somewhere in the bowels of that massive city. The place was dark and rank, reeking with the smell of mildew, urine, and death. I heard cries and moaning sounds in the darkened cells around me, and the sound of someone wailing out in some distant room. I tried not to wonder what unique tortures they had in store for me.

  By the dim light of a lantern, Wulvine led me to the end of the tunnel and threw me into a cold dark cell. I had just enough to light to see that the nearby cells were empty, and then he turned away and darkness washed over me. I tried to find a clean, dry spot on the bare wooden floor. I settled down, leaning back against the wall, trying not to think about my broken arm as the groans and screams of the other captives filled my ears. At some point, I fell asleep.

  I woke hours later to the sound of my cell door opening. I blinked against the weak light as a small, shadowy figure came into the room carrying a lantern. It was a Tal’mar woman, but she was dressed in Vangar clothes.

  “Rest,” she said, putting her hand on my forehead.

  A sense of warmth and relaxation washed over my body, and a sigh escaped my lips. My eyes rolled back in my head and a warm, prickly sensation moved up and down my arm. I felt something happening there, something eerily unnatural that I couldn’t quite place, but it didn’t bother me. In retrospect it should have, because I remember having the distinct feeling that things were moving inside my arm. Whatever magic the woman worked to heal me had also sedated me like a cup of duskwood-laced tea. My entire body was warm, and I remember having a strange floating sensation.

  “It is done,” she said a few minutes later, pulling her hands away from my head.

  “Good,” said the overseer’s voice from somewhere behind her. “Have her brought to me.”

  I blinked, trying to find him, but he was out of sight down the hall. The girl paused as she turned away. She gave me a dark look and then reached out, brushing my cheek with her finger. Her touch was faint, delicate like a ray of sunlight kissing the clouds, and it warmed my skin with a faint tingling sensation that quickly spread throughout my body. Then she turned away and vanished down the hall. Wulvine appeared in her place.

  Wulvine caught me up in rough hands and tossed me out the door. I stumbled, tripping over my own feet, and ran headlong into the adjacent cell. I should have felt pain, but instead it was like the sound of someone tapping on a distant door. There was something wrong with me. Whatever the girl had done to me had left me dizzy and unfocused, as if I’d drunk too much wine. A dull numbness saturated my entire being. I couldn’t even see straight, much less form a coherent thought.

  “Enough!” Overseer Rutherford shouted at Wulvine. “This one is mine!”

  Wulvine gathered me up and tossed me over his shoulder like a sack of flour. I turned my head this way and that, trying to get a look at things, but I couldn’t seem to focus. Wulvine carried me through a maze of darkened tunnels that might have gone on for minutes or days, I couldn’t tell which.

  I vaguely recall our journey ending in a large room with plush carpets and furniture. Here, Wulvine tossed me onto a red sofa and stood back. He gave me an approving smirk, and then winked at me before he left. I stared after him, my muddled thoughts crashing into each other like broken gears as he disappeared through the heavy iron door.

  I cast my gaze about the room, wondering but not really thinking. I made a small effort to push myself up, but found it too challenging. With a sigh, I settled back into the sofa, listening to the sound of my own breathing.

  Rutherford appeared before me. He was dressed in a long fur coat, with gloves and a hat. Slowly, deliberately he stripped these items away as he stared at me. He placed them meticulously on a hanger near the fireplace and then stood by the fire, staring at me. I stared back, wondering, waiting. Somewhere deep down inside me, a voice was screaming:

  “Run, get out of there! Hurry, before it’s too late!”

  But I couldn’t consider the voice because I couldn’t think. I couldn’t postulate what was about to happen. I was helpless as a babe, lying there, waiting for the inevitable. I couldn’t bring myself to care, much less stop it from happening.

  Rutherford poured himself a drink of liquor from a bottle I didn’t recognize. He sipped at it, watching me quietly, a grin playing at the corners of his mouth. Click, whir, thump. Click, whir, thump.

  At last, he set down the glass and approached me. He clenched his mechanical fist and the smile vanished from his face like a wisp of smoke on the wind
. He reached out for me and I dizzily pushed myself back into the couch. The soft cushion resisted, and I fell into his grip. The overseer caught me by the throat and lifted me into the air.

  “This is a moment to celebrate,” he said, looking up at me. “This is the first of many nights that I assure you, you will never forget.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but my body wouldn’t respond. Instead, a drip of spittle escaped my lips, falling straight onto his face. He must have taken this as a deliberate attempt to spit on him. A snarl twisted his misshapen features, the gears on his mask spinning wildly, and I gave him a crooked smile.

  Rutherford roared like an animal as he threw me across the room. I smashed into the wall, shattering a display of fine porcelain in the process, and then fell face-first onto the floor. Strangely, I didn’t feel a thing. My entire body was numb and tingling. I was unbreakable! I could have taken on a sentinel, if I only I could move.

  I lay there on the floor, the soft fibrous rug cool against my face, the smell of the fire filling my nostrils. I heard distant movements, the sound of clicking, whining gears. I heard Rutherford’s deep rattling breath as he came stomping across the room toward me. His shadow filled my vision, his rough hands grasping at the slave collar on my throat.

  I won’t speak of the things that Rutherford did to me over the following minutes, days, years, I didn’t know which because I was barely conscious during those moments and my memories of that time are vague. I had no perception of time, no frame of reality against which to measure its passage. I was simply there, lost in the haze of the moment, unafraid and at times blissfully unaware. And then I was not. Then cold, familiar darkness. My cell.

  The Tal’mar woman came back to me after the beating. I remember thinking that she wasn’t a Tal’mar though, because Tal’mar didn’t dress that way. But if she was a Vangar, I reasoned, then how did she heal me? How did she reach into me, cooling my flesh and mending my bones so effortlessly, so trivially? It was easier for her than drawing breath. With a touch she could master my body, commanding bones to heal, wounds to close, flesh to mend. I couldn’t sort it out.

  I tried to speak to her, the words falling out of my mouth in a jumble. She shushed me and went to work fixing the broken things so that Rutherford could break them again. This was the pattern that was to become my life. I don’t know how many times Rutherford beat me, but without fail the woman returned to heal my body and dull my senses. Sleep always followed, and then the beatings began again.

  In a rare moment of clarity, I wondered why she took the pain away. She didn’t have to. She could have left the pain there, or even made it more intense if she wanted to. Did she do it to spare me the suffering? Was it a simple act of kindness, or part of Rutherford’s diabolical plan to make sure I couldn’t escape? I had precious few moments of consciousness in which to consider these questions, but there was one thing I knew for sure: she kept me alive. The girl kept me breathing so that Rutherford could beat me within an inch of my life.

  Our lives were entwined in some sick, inexcusable way, but still I was grateful for her. Without her, Rutherford would have killed me on the first day. I didn’t have any great desire to go on living at that point, but I did have my memories. They surfaced occasionally, reminding me that I had important things to do. That people I cared about were depending on me. I also had my dreams, but in my dreams I didn’t save Kale or help my brother. I didn’t even escape. In my dreams, the only thing I did was kill Rutherford over and over again.

  On the third day, something changed. The overseer left. I wasn’t aware of this until Wulvine came for me. The Tal’mar girl had just finished healing my wounds and I was like a cloud floating across the sky as Wulvine led me through the maze of hallways to Rutherford’s room. It wasn’t until he closed the door that I realized we were alone.

  Wulvine spun me around, cursing at me in Vangar, and then backhanded me. I felt warmth spreading across my face as I splayed out on the floor. I looked up at him, curious and confused.

  “Rutherford has returned to Avenston,” he said, smirking. “Today, it’s just the two of us. Today you will pay for what you did to me.”

  What happened next is mostly a blank spot in my memory. I know that he beat me of course, just like Rutherford. I also know that at some point, Wulvine hit me too hard and in the wrong place. Something broke inside of me. As numb as I was, I knew that something was wrong. My chest went tight and my breath came in shallow gasps. I doubled over on the floor, curling into a fetal position.

  Before I lost consciousness, the last thing I saw was Wulvine calling for the healer. The look on his face was one of sheer terror. Wulvine thought he had killed me, the overseer’s plaything, and he was terrified of what Rutherford might do to him. I think I may have smiled as darkness swallowed me up.

  A short while later, I heard voices. One of them I recognized as my brother. My eyes fluttered open and I saw him kneeling on the floor next to me. The Tal’mar woman was next to him. Crow held my neck in his left hand, my upper arm in his right. The Tal’mar woman moved her hand slowly up and down my torso. Her body was twisted slightly, as if reaching for something. I lowered my gaze to see her second hand on Wulvine’s bare chest. The Vangar was lying on the floor next to me, unconscious. I passed out after that.

  When I came to, I was lying on Rutherford’s bed. Crow and the Tal’mar woman were standing over me. “How do you feel?” he said in a low voice. “Can you move?”

  I pushed myself upright, taking an inventory of my body. “I feel fantastic,” I said. “Like I’ve slept for a week.” That wasn’t right, though. I couldn’t have… I searched my memories, trying to understand all that had happened.

  “I am glad to hear that,” Crow said. “For a while, we feared you might not survive.”

  “Thank you,” I said, still not sure exactly what had happened. I glanced at the Tal’mar woman and saw a flash of her in my memory. “You,” I said. “You’re the one who healed me.”

  She nodded. “I am Raehl Skyrider. A distant cousin of yours, I believe.”

  I turned my head, slowly taking in my surroundings. “You work for the overseer.” My voice sounded more accusatory than I meant it to. The flood of disjointed memories that washed over me was making it hard to control my emotions.

  “She had no choice,” Crow said. “Raehl is a slave, like all the other Tal’mar here.”

  “I tried to ease your pain,” she said hopefully. “There was little more that I could do for you.”

  “It helped,” I said, looking around the room. “Where is Rutherford?”

  “He’s gone back to the city,” Crow said.

  “How did you find me?”

  “It wasn’t easy. I came here three nights ago, the night we parted. I immediately knew something was wrong when I saw the airship leaving Avenston and I saw you chained to the deck. I followed, hoping the Vangars were taking you to the mines as we had planned. It soon became obvious that something had gone wrong. When the airship landed and they took you inside, I could do nothing. I spent many hours trying to find a way into Juntavar. Thankfully, I met Raehl.”

  “He found me on the roof,” she said. “I go up there for a few minutes of privacy, when I can.”

  “Raehl knew where you being held. She assured me that you were alive, but I couldn’t come to you because Rutherford wasn’t letting you out of his sight.”

  “Why did Rutherford finally leave?” I said.

  “We provided some encouragement,” Crow said grimly.

  “What did you do?”

  “I returned to Avenston. I went to the Woodcarvers and I asked them to help me plan a diversion, something that would demand the overseer’s attention.”

  A sinking feeling washed over me. “What did you do, Crow?”

  “We lit some fires,” he said, smiling. “Your friends are quite devious in matters of warfare.”

  “Fires! What did you burn? Did anyone get hurt?”

  Crow gave th
e Tal’mar woman a glance and then drew his gaze back to me. “We were careful. We wanted to be sure that no innocents would be harmed, so we bombed the patrol building.”

  My jaw fell open. “Are you insane? Don’t you know the sentinels will take revenge on the people?”

  “We should have known,” he said. “In retrospect.”

  My heart fell. “Crow, what have you done? What happened?”

  He took a deep breath and reached for my hand. “The sentinels lashed out, just as you said they would. They kidnapped random people off the street, torturing them for information. Some of the sentinels went down into Dockside, where they began attacking peoples’ homes and interrogating everyone they found.”

  “We have to go back!” I said, pushing myself out of bed. “They need our help.”

  “More than you know,” he said softly. “River, your friends had been spreading word of our plan, looking for people to escape with us. The people they spoke to were ready, even desperate for something to happen. When the sentinels began torturing them, they pushed the people too far, and the people began pushing back. A revolution has begun.”

  I grappled with that for a moment, amazed and horrified all at once. I felt a moment of hope. In all my life I had never believed the people of Avenston had it in them. Then I reconsidered my feelings. “They will all die,” I said, shaking my head. “They can’t fight the sentinels. Everyone who takes up arms will be slaughtered.”

  “Perhaps,” Crow said cautiously. “However, from a certain perspective… we may be able to use this to our advantage.”

  I narrowed my eyebrows. “Our advantage? What are you talking about?”

  “Our plan.”

  “We have no plan. Our plan failed the moment Rutherford brought me here instead of the mines.”

  “Not necessarily,” Crow said. “Strategically, we still might benefit from the situation. We can still find your friend in the slave mines. In the process, we might draw the overseer’s attention away from the city and spare a few lives. Failing that, we can also return to Avenston and help the rebels.”