Stormbringer

by Shannon Delany

  Aboard the Artemesia

  The door’s lock clicked, turning, and two guards entered Jordan’s modest room, each dressed in the Artemesia’s signature crew colors of royal blue and gold, crisp jackets spanning strong arms and broad chests. Nearly matched in height, they wore short-crowned blue top hats. The darker-haired man with his carefully trimmed beard and drooping mustache stood an inch or two taller than the man with mousy hair who slouched beside him, holding something the same blue as the crew uniforms.

  “Mouse” threw the wad of fabric onto Jordan’s narrow bed, following it with a rumpled hat, saying, “Clean up and change. Be quick about it.”

  The taller one tipped his hat at her and they both stepped back out of the room, closing the door and turning their backs to the small window in her door to allow her some privacy.

  The moment the door shut, Jordan reached into her neckline and pulled out the tiny blue crystal she’d found in the drain of her cell in Holgate. Her brow furrowed as she turned it to catch the scant light afforded in her room by the ship-powered stormcell lantern. In the crystal’s depths light flickered, shimmering like a butterfly testing its wings. It was lovely, but she sensed it was not for her to keep. Holding the sparkling gem, Jordan slipped out of her golden ball gown, its edges frayed and its beauty savaged by filth and harsh wear.

  She poured water from a pitcher on a stand in her room into a nearly matching basin, setting the tiny crystal down by the basin’s bottom. Her space aboard ship might be nowhere as grand as her rooms on Philadelphia’s Hill, but it was far finer than the straw-strewn floor of Tank 5 at Holgate. She snatched up a small towel they’d provided her and dabbed it into the cool water, wiping off her face and hands and then the more private bits of her before she wrung out the towel in the water and worked on her feet. She had tried to stay somewhat clean in the Tanks by using the water from the bucket she, as a member of the Grounded population, did not need for Drawing Down.

  But if cleanliness was next to godliness, then God kept far from Holgate’s Tanks.

  “Hurry up,” Mouse shouted, banging on the door.

  She jumped, dropping the towel into the basin, where it muddied the water. Jordan wrinkled her nose and, shrugging into the provided blue gown, looked back at the pitcher. There was no time to wash her hair so she smoothed it with damp hands, tucking wisps behind her ears and doing her best to wrap it into a tamed mess. She looked at the provided hat. Wide-brimmed blue straw, a touring hat with a fitted satin crown, it had been beautiful once.

  She sighed. Now its ostrich feathers drooped and the large satin bow was faded from sun. With no hatpin, the odds of keeping it on her head were not good. Still she pressed it over her unruly hair and retrieved the stormcell crystal and slipped it into her neckline.

  Her basin of water full and filthy, she paused. On the Hill the servants either threw washwater out the window or carried it to the privy and dumped it. But, on an airship? She glanced at the windows in the room’s sky-facing wall. “What do I do with the water?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Mouse muttered, shoving through the doorway and snatching the basin. He strode to the window, grabbed a hooked handle at its edge, and cranked the window open, sloshing water against both window and wall, but mostly into the cloud-filled sky. He turned, setting the basin down with a thump, and grabbed Jordan by the arm.

  The other guard—she decided to call him Stache because of his most noticeable feature—stepped forward, resting his hand atop the other man’s hand. “She is only a girl.”

  Mouse pulled away, rolling up to his full height. They were matched after all. Jordan shrank back but Stache stood his ground while Mouse spat out, “You must be new. She is no girl. She is merely a Weather Witch—not even a Conductor.”

  The two squared off, gazes locked.

  Jordan whispered, “I need shoes,” and their attention snapped to her again.

  “You won’t need them where you’re going, Witch,” Mouse snarled.

  “Where am I going that I do not need shoes?”

  “To supper.”

  Stache blinked but said, in a low and even tone, “Someone will be sent to get you shoes. Later. We must not be late,” he explained. For a moment Jordan thought he sounded apologetic.

  She ducked her head and allowed Mouse to take her arm again, leading her out of her cabin and into the narrow hall.

  A door across the hall from hers opened, sliding like the pocket door leading to the linen closet in her family home. After shoving her inside, the guards squeezed in beside her. The door shut, confining them in a warm darkness. The entire room lurched, beginning its rumbling way up. Not many Witches could say they’d ridden in an elevator.

  And only Jordan could accurately claim the elevator in her home—metal and glimmering glass—was far finer than the one in the airship Artemesia. But riding the tight elevator Topside, she remembered that the promises her future once held meant nothing now. Not here.

  Above them the ceiling pulled apart; air and a soft light seeped through the opening it left. They continued up, Jordan glimpsing the glossy Topside deck first at eye level and then, in a moment, the floor of the elevator drew flush to the polished wood of the deck and all that remained of the elevator were three seemingly misplaced walls.

  Jordan of the fallen House Astraea, a freshly Made Weather Witch, was escorted onto the deck.

  To her right was a raised wooden platform surrounded on three sides by wooden posts capped by a sweeping railing and topped at each corner with stormlights. In its midst stood a dark-skinned man with straight hair cropped short and as black as the stormclouds he called. His eyes half-closed in a strange state of ecstasy, the hint of a smile twisted his mouth. His hands moved in jerky motions, fingers flicking out at odd intervals to send cogs turning, wheels flying, and a dozen different spinning devices chattering in their orbits as a storm burgeoned around and beneath them, encircling them in a nest of blackening and roiling clouds.

  Before him was a large capped glass tube filled with clear liquid and crystals that looked like suspended snowflakes, and behind the Conductor was mounted the largest stormcell crystal Jordan had ever seen. The size of her fist, it balanced atop a metal-wrapped wooden post mounted in a thorny crown of jutting copper and silver wires. Jordan froze, mesmerized by the lines of light glittering in its faceted depths.

  The Conductor reached a hand into the air, snaring a snap of lightning that made Jordan jump, and turning, he opened his fist and pressed the living light into the crystal, where it danced, trapped.

  He summoned the storm to feed the stone … There was a brief flash of light and the large crystal dulled faintly, but all the other stormlights brightened.

  Jordan blinked, understanding. The Conductor grew the storm to feed its energy into the crystal and disperse it through the ship in a Pulse.

  Mouse grunted and pushed her forward, but not before she saw one last detail of the workings on the dais: the man who perched on the rail behind the sparkling stone and its webwork of wires, a man who rested the snout of a gun on a stand and yawned, judging every move the Conductor made.

  The Conductor powered the airship, but he did not set its course, that right was the captain’s. Nor did the Conductor guarantee he followed the course. That job belonged to the sniper at his back.

  As there were layers of ranks, so there were layers to the power structure aboard an airship.

  A place for all was more than their young country’s motto.

  Jordan mistepped as the ship bobbed, and Stache reached out, steadying her. She heard a growl and a grind and glimpsed the ends of the the Artemesia’s wings as they popped into another position. The sails spanning their steel-and-wooden fingers snapped taut, filling with air.

  The stormlights mounted on top of each Topside banister post and lining the skeletal metal-and-wooden frame of the wings shined star-bright, building a constellation in the thickening dark.

  Led to the smaller of the two tables, Jordan wait
ed as Stache tugged the table forward, and Mouse shoved Jordan onto a chair that would have toppled had it not been bolted into place. A belt was run around her waist and cinched tight, pulling her snug against the chair’s back. Mouse snatched her right hand and slipped a leather strap around that wrist; no, Jordan realized, not a strap but a slender belt. He adjusted it so it was tight on her wrist, and Stache did the same to her left.

  Then both guards dropped to their knees and raised the hem of her dress.

  Jordan shouted and everyone at the table turned to look at her. Her eyes narrowed, seeing the Maker there, so near the head of the more finely adorned table. She kicked when she felt a man’s hand grab her calf.

  A curse answered when she connected with a guard’s head. “Hold her,” Mouse growled to Stache, and she felt another belt snare one ankle and they switched their grip and repeated the action.

  The whole while she stared straight ahead, her gaze skimming the array of fine foods, hard as the glint coming off the ironstone dishes and polished stormlights. It was as cruel as she could make it, and her gaze latched to the Maker’s face.

  He looked away.

  At the table’s head the captain stood, one hand raised for the guards’ attention. “Welcome, Witch,” he said. “I am Captain Kerdin. This will be where you mark your days from henceforth. This will be where you spend your time and energy, and you will come to know this ship as well as any lover you might have someday had.” He dropped his hand and Mouse pressed down on a lever. The hiss of leather across metal sounded and Jordan yelped as her hand was yanked suddenly to the right, knocking her tankard to the floor.

  “But, as relationships inevitably are in the beginning, there will most assuredly be awkward moments.” He walked around the table, coming to stand just between her table and theirs. “You are now connected to the Artemesia, your hands her wings, your feet her rudder and bowsprit. As she moves, so will you.”

  Jordan’s hand whipped back and cleared the table of her silverware.

  There was a gasp and Jordan recognized the child, Meggie.

  “Keep your hands high,” the captain instructed. “Pay attention and try to feel the shifts before they happen. Try to sense them, anticipate them—and soon enough the power will shift and you will control them. And here—” He produced a hatpin, securing her hat to her head. “You may have this. But only here.” He motioned to a man standing stiffly by the server’s cart and the man lifted a violin and began to play. The captain smiled, dancing his way back to his seat. “And mind you,” he said over his shoulder, “this is the simplest stage of your training. This is the basis of all Conducting.”

  She stared at her wrists, blinking back the moisture burning at the edges of her eyes.

  Her lower lip stuck out, quivering, as she tried to do what he said. She pressed her shoulders back and lifted her hands, doing her best to look somehow appropriate for dinner even dressed in the recently acquired blue gown with its worn and threadbare hems and edges. This dress was a far cry from the original elegance of her golden gown, but this dress …

  At least this dress was not the trap the last one had been.

  Everything else here was the trap.

  Jordan listened to the air around her—the breeze that stilled and stormed at strange intervals and seemed sometimes a reaction to the mighty ship’s wings and sometimes a result of the raising of them. She reached for the tankard, which had been righted and refilled, and nearly had it before her hand was whisked away again, only the tips of her fingernails making contact with the tankard’s handle.

  The Wandering Wallace rose, carrying a tripod with a box mounted on it. Jordan recognized a camera obscura—her family had a portrait made by one.

  He stood it by the table, pointed the machine’s capped lens at the diners. Except for Jordan. “Everyone please stay still,” he requested as he removed the cap. “Dear Conductor,” he called to the man who was ever in motion, “might I trouble you for sunlight?”

  The Conductor and captain exchanged glances. “Set her to glide,” the captain said.

  The Conductor moved to the side of the dais, throwing his weight behind a large lever to thrust it forward. Jordan jumped as the ship’s gigantic wings fully unfurled with a boom that outstripped the muffled thunder. The clouds overhead peeled away and sunlight slanted in to brighten Topside beyond the power of its bright stormcell crystals.

  The Wandering Wallace stepped around the camera obscura and again sat beside his woman, looping an arm around her shoulders. She smiled and he said, “Perfect! Everyone smile and look at the lens. This will only take a minute … or seven…”

  The diners and even the violinist stayed still, posing, while the machine caught the sun’s rays. Only Jordan and the Conductor kept moving—and she knew that meant only she and the Conductor would be excluded from the picture. If they were caught at all in the image they would seem to be ghosts. She took the time to eat a few bites.

  “That should do right well,” the Wandering Wallace said, moving back to reclaim the device. “Thank you for indulging me.”

  The captain threw his hand into the air and the Conductor dragged the lever back with a grunt, adjusting the wings. He raised his eyes to the hole in the clouds and Jordan thought she heard him sing something as the hole was stitched shut and they were again entirely enclosed in the brewing storm.

  Before Jordan the violinist picked up playing again, his music punctuated by the constant and varying click-click, clatter, and whir of mechanics from the Conductor on his raised dais behind her as he powered the storm and all within the ship through the large and glittering stormcell behind him, tweaking the movement of the ship that threatened to draw and quarter his eventual replacement.

  Philadelphia

  John finished his work as quickly as he could after Laura had come to him with her concerns about Lady Astraea’s behavior. His first stop hadn’t been to clean up after a long day of tending the yard and moving things of significant size, but to find Laura and make his way to Lady Astraea’s room with an appropriate escort.

  Laura surprised him with the announcement that her ladyship was occupied hosting a guest for a late tea, as the woman no longer had much appetite even for supper. It was strange. Nearly no one called on a household fallen from grace. Few people bothered with the Astraea household at all. No deliveries were made—not ice, not milk …

  A small crew of servants that remained, stubbornly against Lord Astraea’s wishes, gathered everything in from the markets—either from the market that ran by day featuring fresh fruit and vegetables or the Night Market, which specialized in darker and more dangerous fare. The staff accepted a cut in already modest wages, but they had good beds for sleeping and fair quantities of food filling their bellies. That was more than many of his kind could boast of. A freed African in Philadelphia, John knew that though things seemed bad, they could be far worse. So John, and a select few members of the staff, stayed on.

  Laura turned the key, opening Lady Astraea’s door for him. He stepped inside the room—the first time since he’d climbed up the treacherous rose trellis with her ladyship slung unconscious over his back. The night of her reanimation he had slipped her into bed, closed her in for safety’s sake, and sought out Laura. His original and most well-versed coconspirator in the saving of her life had been arrested, embroiled in a multitude of accusations. And Chloe had been summarily executed.

  John was determined not to depart this world as Chloe had—neck snapped at the end of a rope.

  Or, if that was what God determined his lot in life to be, John would at least hold it off as long as he could, because what waited for him on the other side of death was not something he looked forward to any longer.

  His would not be a homecoming to the pearly gates, nor was he expecting a welcome from some low-swinging chariot “coming for to carry him home.”

  No. He’d saved someone’s life and was fairly certain that meant the damnation of his soul.

  “The so
ul stone should glow differ’nt,” he said, looking round. “Should be in the lantern nearest to where Lady Astraea tried to do herself harm. Should glow differ’nt.” He nodded. “With color.”

  Laura stared at him, her mouth agape. “Her soul stone is still here? Why on earth didn’t you get it when—” She looked around and dropped her volume. “—he needed it?”

  “Didn’t know nothin’ ’bout none of this. Not exactly preached about in church or on street corners…” He peered at each lamp near the broad bed. “I shoulda done this weeks ago,” he muttered, shaking his head. “But tragedy has a way of building. Never did seem the right time.”

  Laura stared at him. He rubbed his forehead, his scuffed knuckles nearly pink with scars from hard labor inside and outside his beloved household.

  “It done near slipped my mind…”

  She patted his shoulder. “We’ll find it. We have to. Something’s not right with her. She knows she’s not herself, and her new self—well, she’s meaner than a rabid skunk.”

  “Shouldn’t be. Picked a good stone for her. A new-to-her soul from a real nice lady. Here.” He dug in the pocket of his dusty trousers, pulling out the small namecard that had rested beside the soul stone he chose in the Reanimator’s house.

  She took it from him and read it aloud. “Lady Caroline of House Amalthea. A fine and noble lady of good breeding and manners with a kind heart and a fine disposition.” Laura shook her head. “That sounds not a whit like the woman she becomes sometimes. Not one whit.”