by Unknown
It was meant to be a small war, the stories all said. The mechwork had changed that, though.
“The ruins is safe, you slack duff.” Beneath the dark dawn, Nicolau had taken on the mocking tone he adopted in response to fear and injury among his scrappers. Sabela remembered him smirking the time he’d cut and sealed the stump of her finger when it was lost. “The experts and the spook squads is gone through it six ways from the end times and claimed it all clear.”
“Then ask the experts and the spook squads what’s there, and save me the trip.”
Something in Sabela’s thoughts seized up, so she couldn’t remember what Nicolau had said in response. She felt pretty certain the pig prod had been involved, though.
She remembered walking alone toward the ruins, the other seekers working the safer open ash behind her. This was a job for just her, Nicolau had said. He’d heard rumors of something big. Sabela picked her way along pathways of ash, watching for strike-spots of fire and lightning. Ahead was a great field of tangled steel strung with flapping canvas like wind-blown flags. Dangerous for a seeker not at the top of her game.
“There’s no such things as ghosts,” Nicolau had said. “There’s just dead machines for halfwit folk to be afraid of. Not a proven tinker like you. You’re not afraid, are you, Sabi?”
Nicolau was the only one who called her Sabi. She hated it.
In the dark now, Sabela found her starling hanging from her belt. In response to her touch, it unfurled its wings and set itself into motion, mesh gears spinning up to a staccato clacking hiss. She set its lamp alight, fingers flicking control studs along its spheroid body, then tossed it to the air.
In the flying scutter’s shimmering light, she saw the spark switch whose spasm of white lightning had coursed through her and put her down. The switch was a dead-drop condenser, set up to store all the power shunted into it when its circuit went dark. She should have gone back down the line, looked for a shunt point, and grounded out any stray charge there. It was a novice seeker’s mistake, its obviousness burning for a moment in Sabela’s heart.
She was no plain seeker, though. She was a tinker, and the best in Nicolau’s troupe. She was ready for this.
You are ready for what, ghost?
The words at her ear caught her by surprise. “You can go anytime, voice.”
No. You are the one not meant to be here.
“Wrong about that.”
The light of the starling showed Sabela where to go as she flexed and flicked an insulated prod from her belt kit into the switch. She had no need anymore to fear the white lightning she’d so effectively grounded out on herself. When that was done, she followed the starling along the spark lines, checking each connection where it split off from the main. She watched the scutter’s lamp flash coded signals to mark each point of power detected as it went. She noted which points had worked loose and carefully tightened each in turn, knowing their power would be hungry for her fingers.
The starling was the newest of the scutters that Sabela shaped from mechwork scraps and tatters. The snake she pulled from her jacket pocket was one of her first pieces, simple in design but most effective. It coiled its oiled links around her wrist as its head lit up, giving her a working lamp as she checked and tightened a dozen wire fittings. When she was done, she punched the power from standby to active and held her breath.
With a bang, that power surged. She heard cables crackle, saw slack pipes pulse out with sudden pressure. A humming sounded out as arc glow flared around her, and she shielded her eyes for the moment it took them to adjust.
When she looked out again, she had remembered where she was.
And where is that, ghost?
“Behemot,” she whispered. “It’s mine.”
She had tripped across the name by accident, etched into the edge of a shattered wing. Most of the morning had already gone to routine salvage and avoiding the collapse of ash pits filled with rusting iron. Her breather had howled against smoke and ash as she dug deeper to fully realize what she’d found, working her way in through layers of steel and rotting canvas. The remains of the last vessels Behemot had destroyed as the legendary airship fell to its doom.
Sabela remembered why she was there. She felt the last pieces of everything fitting into place in her head, locking in tight. “I’m going to make Behemot fly again. I’m going to show them all.”
She realized she was answering a question no one had asked. She shrugged as she collected her tools, setting the starling to sleep at her belt again.
You should not be here, ghost.
“Got work to do, voice,” she said. “Stay out of my way.”
Sabela took the twisting passage leading down, away from the entrance she had carefully opened through a blast port almost as wide as she was. She crawled slowly, checking for stray power coursing where it shouldn’t. The interior of the engine core that she had cut her way into was remarkably intact, though. It spoke to the strength with which the great airship had been built, its interior struts and trusses as thick around as Sabela’s waist.
Like a sinuous squirrel, she crawled through nests of cables that quivered with the standby power pulsing through them, ready to shunt fire and lightning to the sails and blast ports that had once taken Behemot to the air. In the darkest days of the Great War That Was, the airships that unleashed bright death from the sky had coursed like birds across a hundred nameless battlefields. But Behemot was the greatest of those airships, whose creation had swung the tide of war and whose fall and destruction had ultimately lost it.
Except Behemot wasn’t destroyed, and Sabela was the only person in the world who knew that.
What is it you seek, ghost?
“I’m going to make Behemot fly. You don’t listen very well, voice.”
I wasn’t asking your orders. I was asking your goal.
“You know.”
And how would I know?
“Because I’m imagining you.” That realization settled into Sabela’s head even as the words were spoken, and she felt the satisfaction that came of having solved that puzzle. “I got the pulse shock in me. Scrambled my thoughts, and you’re what’s left over.”
It was a thing that happened sometimes. All scrappers lived with those risks as they scoured blackened battlefields in search of clean iron and precious brass. Insignias and medallions in gold and silver, sometimes, ready to fetch real coin in the pawnshops in the larger towns of the frontier. And above all else, the precious mechwork that had once turned the ash-grey battlefields red with blood and fire.
How do you know the pulse shock did not kill you? The tone of the voice was flat in her mind, but Sabela thought she felt it mocking her.
“Because if I was dead, I’d remember dying. You remember the things that happen to you.”
By your logic, ghost, you were never born.
“I remember my Ma and Da. You lose, voice.”
That was half a lie. She remembered her Da mostly, her Ma gone earlier to become just traces of voice and memory now. It was her Ma who had first showed her the tinker’s ways, letting Sabela help repair the mechwork that her father collected, and the pieces that came in to their wagon for repairs when they traveled the trade roads.
With those tinker’s ways, Sabela turned bits of still-functioning mechwork not large enough to sell to the machinists in town into the scutters that she and the other children used to search and sweep into tangled wreckage and unseen spaces. The dangers of those spaces gave most scutters a short life and highlighted their usefulness in keeping the scrappers from getting hurt, but Sabela was always happy to build new ones.
There were good seekers among Nicolau’s troupe. Cibran and Illiam were the best, after her. No one else had Sabela’s tinker’s touch for the mechwork, though. That wasn’t a thing you could teach, her Ma had always said.
The strength and precision with which Behemot had been built made the long day’s job of restoring the engine core a simpler matter than Sabela would have t
hought. It was mostly time and rote labor, working her way one by one through power linkages torn free from their conduit lines. She patched and prodded. She repaired bright brass coils melted from the fatal heat of Behemot’s fall, hunting down free wire from the less important lighting systems to rewrap them. She bypassed and rerouted, listening always to the instinct of her touch and the readings the starling gave her as it flitted through the shadows.
When she was done, she rested a while. She took a drink of water from a skin bulb, tasted the grit of the ash fields that never seemed to wash away.
What are you, ghost? With your tools and your deft touch?
Sabela knew she was talking only to herself, but her pride made her answer. “Tinker. The best thing in Nicolau’s troupe.” As she shifted along a narrow gantry, she saw a filter pack below that marked the head of an airway. With the power systems patched, the airways would be her first approach to the controls that would test that power.
And what is Nicolau?
Sabela scowled as she remembered the pig prod. “He manages things. Buys and sells what we find for him.”
Your captain, then.
“If you like.” She pulled the filter pack free to peer into an air shaft beyond, battered but clear.
So when you resurrect Behemot as you hope to do, it will be on Nicolau’s order. He is the one who sent you here, tinker.
“Won’t matter it’s his order. I tell them I’m the one who patched Behemot, and I’ll prove I’m more than just a scrapper. I’ll get out from under him. I’ll find some place better.”
Sabela hadn’t really thought the words until she spoke them, but she felt them ring true. She had traveled with Nicolau since her father died because she had nowhere else to go. He kept her down, though. Wouldn’t take her to the cities where she could do real work. Always just scrapping because that was what Nicolau knew.
We called you mechs before, the voice said, and Sabela thought she heard a strange wistfulness in its tone. Tinkers. Working the machines and shaping their power for the captains to control.
Sabela heard her Ma’s voice in her mind suddenly. Not a thing she wanted to think about right now, needing to focus. “Talking to the mechwork isn’t something to be taught . . .”
The floor beneath her feet gave way suddenly. A section of support lattice had crumbled to lightning rust, the bars looking iron-solid but turning to black powder with a touch. She was wary but not fast enough, swinging for an out-thrust support with both hands but only slowing herself as she fell.
She tumbled, hitting once. A long space of weightlessness told her the darkness she fell through was larger than she’d seen before. She hit a second time and stopped.
You should not have come here, ghost.
Sabela felt her heart skip an unexplained beat at the sudden sadness in the voice. She fumbled the snake from her belt and set its glow to full bright, then sent it crawling up high so that light would spread.
Black ash covered the wide expanse of windows above her, thick glass intact but showing fracture lines, rainbow bright. Sabela saw chairs and consoles canted sideways, telling her the angle at which Behemot had settled beneath the ash. The confines of the engine core had come with no real sense of up and down, but she was reoriented now as she mapped out the shadowed space of the great airship’s flight deck.
Most of the crew who had died were still in their chairs, dry rot stripping their flesh away, eating into canvas straps and dark grey uniform jackets. Their heads were slumped over and down in deference to gravity, but most still had their hats on. Other bodies were tumbled into heaps along the side of the deck, which was below Sabela in the orientation of the crash that had turned left to up, right to down.
Along the walls, she saw the shadows move.
It wasn’t a trick of the light. The snake coiled motionless above her. It wasn’t a trick of her eyes. She worked the litany of waking again to clear her thoughts, but the words ground down beneath a rising fear as the darkness began to swirl around her. Watching her.
“What are they?” she whispered.
Ghosts, the voice said. Like you.
High above her, Sabela saw the deck’s power panel, no sign of damage. She frantically sent the starling up, flitting through the air on quick flaps of canvas wing to latch itself onto the panel’s key breaker. She read the power spooling there in the codes of the scutter’s flashing lamp.
“No such things as ghosts,” she whispered, trying to calm herself as the shadows flowed like liquid. She remembered Ma’s words as she backed away. “Spirit’s in the living body. Spirit’s the flow of blood and thought, and the dead have got no use of it.”
So the living say. The dead say it differently.
Sabela jumped for the now vertical floor and climbed desperately, the shadow flowing to pursue her. She felt it reaching for her as she scrambled across cable and rough lattice, climbing over and past a body spilled out to hang free when its chair mount had snapped in two. At the height of the cantilevered deck, she slung herself onto the power panel, feeling it pulse beneath her. Ready for her.
There are ghosts in all machines, the voice said. The special among the mechs can speak to them in their own way. Like you. Even if the ghosts seldom speak back.
Her hands were a blur as she set the panel switches for startup. The voice was shrill in her head, and with each word, she felt a faint spike in the power she aligned and activated.
These ghosts are screaming now, though, to tell you they are the spirits of this machine of war and they are tired of killing.
“They should have stopped me when I came in, then.” Sabela saw the panel lights go green beneath their cracked glass. She grabbed the key breaker with both hands.
We are tired of killing. Please, ghost.
She remembered the stories from when she was a girl, the war not that long done but already more than ready to be turned to dark tales. She felt the fear of those tales now, of mechwork engines that had parted battlefields like steel plows through wet loam. Machines whose skin was cold iron and coursing fire. She knew the tales of the terrible tide of war Behemot had unleashed and how the great airship had vanished in the end within a storm of elemental fire like the world had never seen.
She focused to push the visions away. “I don’t care whatever war you were in.”
We care about the next war, which begins when the monster you wish to resurrect screams its way to the sky once more.
“Folk won’t fight again. That’s what everyone says. Show them Behemot come back, and they’ll be too scared to fight.”
Other folk have said those same words. And sixteen million died to prove them wrong, ghost.
“I’m not the ghost!” Sabela screamed it, fighting the fear.
You will be, child.
She meant to turn the key breaker. She was ready to feel the power surge that she had spent the long day reshaping. But she pulled the breaker instead, hauling on it with both hands to tear it free of its housing. As the growling hum of Behemot ground down to silence, she threw the breaker helplessly at the shadow that swirled around her now.
“There’s no such things as ghosts.” Sabela’s throat hurt.
No, child. “If I was dead, I would remember dying,” you said, and the dead do remember. We are the spirits of war, driving death before us. We are what’s left when the power of the world is corrupted to destroy that world, leaving ash and madness in its wake.
“Let me go . . .”
Yes, child.
Shadow rose around and past her. Sabela saw it swirling around the starling. She felt something change.
To feel the flow of energy within mechwork is a thing that cannot be taught, the voice said. Your mother told you true. It is a gift of fate that few share in and fewer still will ever master.
“Let me go,” Sabela said. She felt less afraid now.
Yes, child. We will go.
A blood-red sunset carried her back toward the camp one slow step at a time. She saw Nic
olau watching for her, pushing forward to close the distance as she drew near. Not too close, though. It was dangerous in the ash.
“Got everything I could.” Sabela hefted the bag over her shoulder. She had claimed a choice assortment of bulbs and wire, of mechwork bits salvaged from the shattered airships that had buried Behemot before she walked away. It would fetch good coin but was common enough that Nicolau would have no reason to go back in search of more.
“Nothing big?” he muttered. “I heard rumors.”
“The experts and the spook squads called it clear. Listen to them next time.”
Nicolau glared as he swung the pig prod, though with a sense of obligation more than malice.
“No,” Sabela said.
She felt the power of the prod pulse to full life, its condenser drained in a heartbeat to arc past its insulated grip. Nicolau’s lank hair shot out in a haze of grease and static lightning as he was knocked over backward with a scream.
The other scrappers drew closer. Sabela nodded to them all. She picked up the pig prod where it had fallen, watching as a trace of shadow detached from the snake coiled around her wrist and slipped inside it.
“Must be faulty,” she said. “I’ll fix it for you.”
Nicolau growled as he stood, dusting himself off. “Don’t be thinking above your place, Sabi.”
“My name’s Sabela.”
She ran through the litany of waking as the others followed her back to the camp, Nicolau watching confused from the shadows behind them. Her name, her age.
Sabela, the ghost said to her ear. Twelve summers.
Place and action. Where she was, why she was there. She’d spend more time thinking about that, now that she had someone to talk to.
Scott Fitzgerald Gray (9th-level layabout, vindictive neutral) is a writer of fantasy and speculative fiction, a fiction editor, a story editor, and an editor and designer of roleplaying games—all of which means he finally has the job he really wanted when he was sixteen. He shares his life in the Canadian hinterland with a schoolteacher, two itinerant daughters, and a large number of animal companions. More info on Scott and his work (some of it even occasionally truthful) can be found by reading between the lines at insaneangel.com.