"Basically, it is made of magnets and bones and it is big, everyone!" I yelled, and gritted my teeth. "Don't let it get to the ship!"
The thing reared back, slowly beginning to take shape. "How do we stop it? Liza? Dale?" I cried, looking for a blunt object to use. "Just beating it into pieces doesn't seem to work!"
"The whole thing is being held together by a strong magnetic force. If we can find its source, we can drop it and it should fall apart!" said Victoria.
Easier said than done, I thought to myself. The thing finally had taken a full and silent shape-- a giant spider-like construct, cobbled together from bone and craps of metals. It stood unmoving for a moment, the longest moment I have ever experienced. I will never again say, "Give me a moment," because if it is as long as it feels, then I haven't got time for that. Then, the thing hunched downward, and sprang toward us.
I dove to the side, barely avoiding the bulk of the creature as it crashed into the frozen ground. As it landed, the mass of its body shifted so that the head-like portion faced me. I felt a little ill--watching this thing move was unsettling, and not just because it likely planned to tear me into small pieces. Back to my feet, ready for its next movement, I watched it carefully.
A new appendage lashed out of the mass, and I just barely managed to duck under it. I was apparently not the only one this thing was attacking, though-- I heard a cry as one of the deck hands was struck and thrown backward by another similar bone-tendril. It seemed this thing's attention span was not limited to one direction, which was all the more reason to try to stop it sooner.
Liza hung back, studying the thing, watching its movements. If anyone could figure out how to stop this thing, it would be her. She snapped her fingers.
"Magnets! Th'whole thing works on magnets! Tha's it's secret, tha's how it sees ye!" she said, and dashed back toward the ship.
Dale, seeming to understand, grinned. "Everyone, listen up!" The creature slashed and swung at the closest moving objects. "Stay out of its way, throw in as much metal as you can grab! It will weight the thing down--" he was explaining, but then a great bone metal leg struck him, and he flew back, slamming into a supporting beam of a nearby building.
He slumped down, and did not move.
"DALE!" shouted Victoria, who dashed off toward his limp body. The thing "saw" her coming, and began to swing another mass toward her. I took that opportunity to grit my teeth and leap directly in the way, bringing my knee up to try to guard my internal organs from the prospect of becoming external ones.
"Duck duck duck DUCK DUCK!" I yelled, and Victoria just barely caught the message in time to fling herself downward, while I took the brunt of the blow and tried to roll inward toward the center of the mass.
Whatever Liza was planning, she had better get on it, and quickly. In the meantime, I managed to stay somehow on my feet, though the dizziness and nausea that I remembered from the pub two nights ago spread slowly through my side. I tried to focus, and scanned the body quickly.
I seized a thick leg bone and wrenched it from the body mass. I hefted it once, and then brought it slamming into the mass from which I had taken it. Bones broke and splintered, but wherever there was metal attached, they stayed in the mass.
What was worse, I felt a light tugging on my waistcoat pocket. My watch, on its chain, had come out of its resting place and was being pulled into the body by the magnetism. "That is MINE!" I said, twisting away to keep it from claiming my fine timepiece. It responded by pulling at my little knife in my belt.
I snatched at the knife, kept it tucked tightly into my belt, and patted my watch one more time, just in case. Then, I realized what I had done.
My leg was being enveloped, cut up, beaten by the blunt bones. The thing was devouring me, absorbing me into its own bulk, and I could not escape by vice of my metal accouterments! My spyglass, my watch, and my waistcoat buttons-- all of it was pulling me deeper into the center of the swirling and crunching horde of scrap and bone. I struggled, trying to turn, wrench myself free from its grip.
Every movement I made, something pressed harder, cut slightly deeper. At this rate, another few seconds and my whole body would be minced into scraps!
I turned again, struck again. I saw a glimmer for just a moment of something inside the mass that was newer, or at any rate less rusted, than the scraps of metal or the bone fittings. Vaguely, I was aware of someone yelling to get away from it, to lead it toward the ship.
What? No, not toward the ship, that's got metal in it, I thought, but then I heard a clear voice come through the grinding and clanking.
"Ye cannae have my cap'n! Get yer rusty paws off'im!"
All at once, there was a sudden buzz feeling in the air, as though the very atmosphere around me was vibrating. The thing that held me gave a shudder, and then stopped. I could hear Liza again.
"Bet ye don' like this, aye? Bigger magnets donnae do ye much credit!" she said. The buzz feeling grew in intensity, and I saw bits of the beast begin to fall apart, as though they had lost their charge. "See how ye like being told wha't'do!"
The beast dissolved into a pile of bones and fragments. Liza, standing near the ship with a metallic rod in each hand, dashed forward, and, tossing the rods down, began to dig in the pile. She came up with something shiny, the thing I saw earlier? I scrambled out of the pile and staggered back with Liza, who, though the creature was reduced to no more than a pile, still moved with an urgency that told me she was doing something sciency.
She pried the thing open, and inside, a coil of copper wiring wrapped around a spool spun madly between two carrier rods. Grabbing the bone I still had in my hand, she stuffed it into the box, and the spinning coil ground to a halt. Silence for a moment.
Then Liza wiped her forehead with her glove and sighed.
"Yeah, 's all right, ah've broken it," she said, and leaned backward a bit.
*****
It took a while for Victoria to pull all the debris from my legs, and a little while longer for her to assess how much work she'd have to do to make them stop bleeding. She and her little team set about making sure nobody was terribly hurt, and after wrapping my legs up and promising she'd do a better job of it when her tools were ready, we checked one more of the buildings. As far as could be seen, no more great mechanical magnet beasts were hiding inside, so we set up a bit there. A fire built for warmth and everyone now having a well-needed rest, I glanced back outside at the pile of bones.
"It's a brilliant idea," Liza was saying. "Ye make a central sort o' brain, li' th'ones we 'ave in Dale's little things, an' ye give it two commands, use what ye c'n find about ye and protect where ye are from intruders. This bloody fella's some kind'o genius," she said.
"But how did you stop it?" asked someone. Liza's eyes flashed.
"Ah know it worked off magnets, an' a good way tae make magnets angry is tae have a bigger charge nearby, ye see. Magnets're jus' like electrics, so when ye make a current, ye make a magnetic field. Humans make th'same kind o' field naturally, which's how it could pinpoint us all, likeliest. Ah just used th'engines to generate a current and then fed that current through th' static tubes to get a strong charge-- that was what th' metal sticks were doing, generatin' that charge."
"That’s amazing! How does it work?" asked another, but I turned back toward the fire and shut my eyes. Victoria was going to come and fix my ribs, again, in a bit, but I needed a mind-rest, too. For a few minutes, at least, I dozed off by the fire. We had plenty of time, anyway. No way the Antimony's Eyes would get their clunky ships through that storm.
No way.
When I woke up a little while later, I took a stroll around the broken village, giving the pile a wide berth. From what the others and I could gather, this village was originally a millinery town, making hats and the like for subsistence. When the ice came, everyone must have evacuated, as evidenced by the possessions and equipment left behind.
"What puzzles me," said Dale as he continued to wind and wind his little autom
ata, "is just what on earth that thing was? How did it get here? And why were the remains here modified into fodder for the thing?" He glanced over at his table, where six or seven little clockworks were meticulously taking apart the central device and labeling all the bits.
Victoria chimed in. "The bones that it used were obviously not from this village. They were far too prepared, far too tailored for use by that thing. Where did they come from?"
A tiny clockwork skittered up Dale's trouser leg and presented a rounded flat piece of brass, a tag of some sort. It was beautifully embossed with two letters: C W.
Everyone was silent for a second after Dale read the letters out. Liza, who was having a much-needed break and a perhaps slightly-less-needed third mug of stout, shook her head and sighed.
"We're headed direc'ly for the workshop of a looney," she said. "'Dollmaker' my oiled arse. If this's his work, 'e's a right creep, an' I'd not buy a doll fer me kid from a creep like 'im." She paused for a second. "Though, bet 'e's got lots o' blueprints and th'like, what I and Dale could turn into Lyrea for us. Shame 'e's a looney." Sip.
We could not dig a hole for the bones, as the ground was too cold. The best we could do was to try to cover them up a bit with debris from the houses and workshops. As we worked, though, news I had definitely not wanted to hear fell from the Nephele's fighting top.
"Captain! Remember that wind storm?"
"I vaguely recall something like one..."
"Can windstorms get holes in them?"
"I have never heard of such a thing."
"I ask because it looks like there are a few ships coming through where we came, but with a lot less lurching and pitching."
I said a word that sailors know and children should not.
"Seems that our esteemed visitors have not left well enough alone, everyone! All hands, back on deck! We're getting out of this town for good!" I called, and a responding cry came after. Everyone scrambled to get back to their places.
The Nephele rose from the ground with a creak, steam escaping from her valves as the engines roared to life. More coal was piled into the fires, and we turned to face our destination. Just then, though, I got a tingly feeling in my neck, and looked back toward the wind wall, where the Antimony's Eyes ships were slowly somehow pressing through the storm. A red glow flickered into sight, and then, a huge blast of red fiery no-goodness streaked from the front ship, lancing into the ground where we were only moments ago. It burned right through the ice, down into the ground, and left a smoking hole where it struck.
Nope. No way was I sitting around to have that thing shoot my goddamned ship.
We didn't have time, anyway. The Antimony's Eyes were nearly through the storm wall themselves, and if that first cannon blast was anything to go by, my crew would want nothing to do with the business end of that weapon any time soon. We began to speed away, as fast as the Nephele's wings would take us.
Liza's voice rumbled up through the pipes. "Cap'n, the static tubes're gettin' a bit over-ripe down here, looks li' th'charge from earlier didn' discharge like I wanted. What'd'ye think about sending them Antimony's shiteheads a message?"
"What do you mean?" I asked back. The glass tubes in the hull of the ship, several meters long each, were the equivalent of lightning rods for a flying device. They gathered up the static electricity that came in contact with the ship, so as to help prevent actual lightning from ripping her in half or catching her aflame. They could then be discharged when the ship was grounded safely. Liza's earlier stunt, though...
"I've got me an idea, y'see," she began. She rattled off a bunch of physics, words like "charge" and "resistance" peppering the explanation, and finished with, "So if we'c'n put together some sor' of amplifying apparatus, then we'd be able to discharge th'lectricity we have stored up in these things while still up in'th'air, y'see."
"Wouldn't that be inviting a lightning strike?"
"No, cap'n, it'd be calling it ourselves." I could almost hear Liza's beaming grin through the pipes.
"You hear that, engineering? Make it happen! Amplifier, attach it to the prow, let's show them who is boss around here!" I cracked my knuckles. They might have a fire cannon, but if we could control the very lightning in the sky...
I pulled the rudder hard, and we swung off toward the location of the giant mountain of ice. Behind us, the wall of storm was breaking more and more, and the shapes of the offending vessels becoming clearer. How the blazes were they getting through the storm currents with so little trouble? Some kind of atmospheric nullification technology?
I could hear the skittering of Dale's clockworks behind me, retying ropes that came loose and refitting brass fixtures that had been shaken crooked in the storm. They had finished the repairs of the sails and the body of the ship, those clever little things, and now they were doing their last little checks. Dale sat on the deck behind me, a winding key dancing between this little automaton and that.
I opened the steam valves to full. We needed to make up time, a lot of it, and we needed to do it yesterday. Full steam ahead, we positively zipped over the landscape. Ahead of me, Liza's three engineers skipped busily here and there, bringing spare parts to kludge together that amplifier Liza talked about. One of them noticed me looking, and flashed me a smile and a thumbs-up.
Liza sure rubs off on her department, I thought.
The crystal blue mountain was getting closer and closer. I could see the glistening of the ice, and it seemed like I could detect a glimmer of something underneath. I reached for my spyglass.
The lookout shouted down suddenly. "They have come through the storm! They look undamaged! Oh, Captain, I sure hope we are outside of that cannon's range!"
I swung my spyglass back behind us, caught a glimpse of the cannon on the prow, saw the ones manning it turning wheels and ratcheting straps. "They are going to fire, everyone! Brace yourselves!"
I swung the wheel hard to one side just as the sound of the cannon's charge tore through the air. The Nephele lurched, just barely out of the way. Whatever was in that workshop, they must have wanted it badly if they were willing to blow another vessel out of the air to get it.
The blast tore past the ship, leaving a sort of burnt scent in the air. "Liza! How goes the amplifier?" I called. She put up three fingers, reconsidered, and then held up four.
If we could get that thing connected, we could cause a lightning shower, which might be enough to scare off the Eyes for at least long enough to get inside the workshop. The refuge that the workshop might provide would make fighting them off easier, at least, as it would no longer be ship-to-ship combat. That was all we had to bet on.
"You better not be wrong on this, Liza!"
Victoria, a bandage on her arm stained dark over a wound from the bonespider, was gathering her supplies for the excursion into the workshop. If that spider thing was what we met outside of his workshop, what on earth would he be using to guard the inside? She hefted her tools into a large leather satchel.
I didn't even have to tell them anything; the rest of the crew knew just what was likely. Here and there, whomever wasn't working directly on keeping us afloat or making the lightning device was strapping on their gear. Ropes, backpacks, sabers, lanterns, the standard adventuring lot. I felt a swell of pride-- the Nephele's crew was the best crew, and no mistaking that. What I didn't teach them, they taught each other, and what I didn't know, they taught to me.
The humming sound of their cannon heating up again became more apparent. I tried to swing the ship again, but they must have anticipated my maneuver, because the ship suddenly bucked to one side like a man thrown from a horse, making a sound not unlike a dragging a stone down a cobbled street. I held fast to the wheel, swore under my breath.
"Hurry it up down there, we need a display of dominance, and I don't mean just showing them my teeth!" I called, and shook my head. "Damage report!"
It took a minute for the assessment. "They seem to have grazed one of our buoyancy tanks, Captain!" came one of t
he engineer's voices. "It's leaking something fierce. We'll maintain float, but that will reduce our speed."
I swore, this time very much on top of my breath. If that was a grazing shot, I'd hate to be on the receiving party of a direct hit! Liza jerked a wrench on a bolt, and then turned to me and waved her hand wide. "I's finished, Cap'n! Get us up a bit more, and we can activate'er!"
The Eyes were gaining on us, and fast. We were minutes away from the workshop, but at this rate, they might just catch up to us, and I had no confidence in their willingness to let us go in first. I pointed my spyglass toward the mountain.
A dark spot, down near the bottom. The sun bleakly shone down through the ice, and I could make out a vague outline of a tall building in the middle of the ice. It looked like there was a passage, unnaturally carved out of the ice, coming from the building, as if someone had used a huge heat generator to bore a hole into the mountain.
The Nephele Ship: The Trilogy Collection (A Steampunk Adventure) Page 3