Ceaseless Steam: Steampunk Stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine

by Scott Andrews (Editor)

  Mateo hid his astonishment with effort. This was too much power. “I still cannot enter the Palazzo Ducale,” he said. “The Venetians can use an Anubis scale as well as we can.”

  “Hatchlings have small souls. The souls do not acquire the experience they need for growth for some time.” Selvaggi smiled. “And what I did to its brain, I’ve done to its soul.”

  “You lobotomized a soul?” Mateo asked in horror.

  “Parts of the soul are required; others are not,” Selvaggi said, waving a hand. “The remains of its soul weigh almost nothing. And I know what to cut from yours.”

  “Mine?”

  “I will trim small parts of it. With the dragon brain in your skull, you’ll weigh only one soul, the same as a normal man. The Anubis scales can blow in the wind for all that they will detect your augment and its magic!”

  Mateo rose, retreating. “I have offered my life to Genoa, over and over. But my soul comes from God!”

  Selvaggi stabbed a finger at him. “Your soul exists to wield augments to fight the enemies of Genoa. Decide your loyalties now, Don Mateo.”

  The breath in him was thin and insufficient, and no more would come. In his mind, the emaciated god on his cross stood on one pan of the scales and all of Genoa on the other. Luciana on the other.

  “Genoa, of course,” he said hoarsely.

  ~ ~ ~

  Mateo dreamed of overwhelming power, and of hell. Power washed heavy over his hands. Men harnessed power by joining themselves to mutilated monsters. Proud monsters became tools, like hammers with souls. Men prodded alight the power of insensate gods, through fires poked into other planes. Genoa stole the secrets of domesticating the gods from the Venetians. The Venetians stole from Genoa. Always chasing. Always fleeing. Always hunting up new gods with which to destroy each other.

  The night, months ago, when he had emptied his augment, they had run him to ground in a fig orchard between Venice and Milan. Forty of them. Condotierri. Fusiliers. Augmented operatives of the Venetian secret police. Pinned him with arquebus fire and lightning.

  Desperate, flailing, Mateo snapped something in his augment, unleashing all the magic it would ever have, in that one moment. Light scoured the orchard, flaying bark from trees. It was a special kind of magic, the kind that peeled the world like an apple, exposing a place beneath it where numb gods hungered for souls. And the gods feasted that night. The forty faces haunted him always. Gods gnawed at them still, because Mateo served the gods who fought.

  You shall have no other gods before me.

  Mateo woke. Moonlight shone through his window. He slid to smooth wood and crawled to the corner. He prayed to the god who would not fight but who could reach the forty men Mateo had put in hell. The dragon brain, so newly in his skull, was silent.

  “Our Father, Who art in Heaven….”

  ~ ~ ~

  Mateo arrived in Venice, ironically enough, on a papal ship carrying a nuncio seeking military aid. The beefy French cardinal was happy enough to take Genoese gold to hide a false priest on board. Mateo spent his days watching the restive horizon.

  Batu, the new augment locked in Mateo’s skull, was a tireless, if odd, conversationalist. Despite multiple lobotomies, he possessed remarkable identity and will. Perhaps this was the way with dragons.

  Batu talked of dragonhood, of how dragons were raised on stories, even in the egg, and how father dragons protected the young after hatching and taught them to forage and hunt in the forests until they could rise into the sky to feed on the things that live in the ether. Batu spoke without a hint of blame in his tone, even though no father had wanted him.

  The idea of Batu never growing to feed on those alien things in the ether seemed to Mateo to be the saddest of things. He tried to hide the feelings from Batu, but the rummaging little brain was tireless and snuffled out everything he wanted among Mateo’s thoughts. Despite Batu’s youth, he seemed to understand his host. Mateo’s grief seemed to inspire some sympathy in the little dragon. Nor did Batu belittle Mateo’s god. The Mongols followed only one god.

  Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the Earth.

  Blessed are those who mourn; for they shall be comforted.

  ‘Don Mateo, mood: darkening?’

  Yes, Mateo thought hesitantly, as the low city of Venice emerged behind a thicket of masts.

  ‘Discipline, theology, concept afterlife reward: not testable,’ Batu pressed.

  Mateo felt a sudden urge to protect this orphaned thing. Batu was childlike, lacking the nuance and faith of wisdom. Like Luciana.

  Not testable, Mateo thought, is not the same as untrue.

  ‘Discipline, epistemology, concept rational method: work of gods measurable by heat or by product of force and distance,’ Batu said. ‘Product of distance and force applied by Christ equals zero.’

  Christ does not give power, Mateo thought. The beasts we harness like pack animals are not true gods. They are sources of power, like lamp oil. They lack agency. They are chaos given hunger. Christ is here to save us. To forgive us.

  Batu’s odd voice burbled but did not address Mateo anymore.

  ~ ~ ~

  Mateo disembarked, moving past port officials to mix into the press of traders, fishmongers and shore crew. Batu had never seen a city in daytime. Had never, in fact, seen anything. Until the vivisection that had put his brain in Mateo’s skull, Batu had lived a sickly life in a crate. He chattered endlessly, anxious for Mateo’s safety, everything framed in the stuttering taxonomic perceptions of dragons. Mateo soothed him as he would a child.

  Mateo walked over bridges and narrow cobbled streets to a quarter where houses crumbled among high weeds. Even squatters avoided this area. Batu’s interrogative throbbed.

  Pestilence emptied this quarter, Mateo answered in his thoughts. People fear lingering ghosts, making it the perfect place for an equipment and information drop.

  Mateo stepped over brambles to a high chicken coop. Caked dust powdered the slatted door. Around him were nothing but crickets and bees. He stepped into the gloom.

  Give me night lenses, he thought.

  Batu filmed Mateo’s eyes with a membrane that colored the shadows bright purple. The low sun shining through gaps in the walls brightened painfully.

  Cut night lenses, Mateo thought after a moment. Smell for magical fields and listening engines.

  The purple dissolved and then became a sea of spots, showing ambient magic in faint yellow splotches. Over the door frame, brightly outlined, a beetle walked. A listening engine. Either the drop was compromised or this was one of the ubiquitous listening engines patrolling the city. They were domesticated from wild Egyptian scarabs and bred for souls large enough to power magical observations and transmitting visions. They sent the crude arrangements of fragmented color in the moment by Helios link, that tenuous, invisible light, but the beetle souls were small. Their visions needed to be re-emitted through a nearby Apollo junction.

  Mateo had used only passive magic so far and likely hadn’t triggered the engine, but he had to risk magic now to fetch his equipment. Time to see if his augment was as good as Selvaggi had promised.

  Batu, Mateo thought, emit an epiphany pulse, low range.

  Magic based on Apollo’s power was logical, straight, following the tenets of Euclid. Its natural antagonist was the chaotic epiphany magic of Bacchus.

  Brief, dizzy wildness confused Mateo.

  Batu droned. ‘Observation: sub-visual burst at twenty-five degrees, elevation forty-five degrees, range, six yards.’

  The junction was dead. The scarab transmitted, but no one was receiving. No one would suspect an enemy operative. An epiphany pulse was not magic that was performed under field conditions.

  Mateo lifted a flat floor-stone. In a hollow were an oiled sack and a well-made sword. The bag contained a nobleman’s hose, tabard and surcoat. At the bottom of the bag was a stone bottle stoppered with gray wax.

  Aletheia waters.

  The river Lethe flowed de
ep underground, taking memories from those who drank of it. The knowledge drained into Aletheia, a deeper river of truth. The waters of the Lethe and the Aletheia were critical espionage and interrogation tools. Mateo cut the wax away and drank.

  Disorientation. He choked.

  Francesco Polani. He was Francesco Polani. Officer of the Guard of the Council of Ten. Sent to Mantua to negotiate a military contract with the condottieri lords. Ambushed there by Genoese spies. Forced to drink the waters of Lethe.

  Mateo shuddered. Horrible fate. To forget everything. Did Mateo now carry Francesco’s sins? He remembered them all.

  Batu, Mateo thought, change my face to match Francesco’s.

  The bones under his cheeks widened. Skin tightened. Jaw receded. Not painful. Disturbing.

  Mateo put on the clothes and emerged from the shack. He crossed back over bridges, winding through crowded markets to the Palazzo Ducale. Here were the ineffective senate, the fiction of the Council of Ten and the Doge, and the reality of the Council of Three and their secret police.

  A pang bit his heart at the sight of the Temple of Odin beside the Palazzo. The onion domes, gilded Byzantine mosaics, and soaring arches were once the Christian Basilica di San Marco, but like Christ Himself, His saints had never intervened in the affairs of men. While some faithful, like Mateo, sought the wisdom and grace of Christ, more pragmatic minds had remodeled the Church of Gold into an altar to Odin.

  In his disguise, Mateo passed under the arches of the Palazzo to the inner courtyard. A guard at the doorway saluted him and opened the door onto a receiving chamber for Palazzo’s Armory. The stained glass images of Roman gods near the high ceiling attenuated the thin light of day. Wall-mounted lamps and candles pooled warm light. Mateo stepped in, the first Genoese spy ever to enter the headquarters of Venice’s infamous espionage service.

  Batu, keep your magic closed and tight. Give them nothing to smell. Venice’s secret police would have as many supernatural listeners, watchers, and sniffers as Genoa’s Intelligence Guild.

  A tall Anubis scale stood against the far wall, near a wide door leading into the depths of the Armory. An old officer seated at a table beckoned him to approach. The door closed behind him.

  “Name and business, signor?”

  “Francesco Polani. Lieutenant of the Guard of the Council of Ten. I am returned from a foreign mission.”

  The officer laboriously wrote out the name. He shuffled through older pages silently, searching. Mateo’s back sweated. Finally, the officer signaled a young sergeant in blue Council livery.

  “Weigh the signor,” he ordered.

  The sergeant led Mateo to the Anubis scale with its shining, gold-plated chains. Mateo stepped onto one scale. Another liveried man, a proud corporal with pox scars on his face, removed a silk coverlet from a shelf, revealing a set of copper feathers. He lifted one and placed it on the scale.

  He frowned.

  Mateo was heavier than the feather weighing one soul.

  The sergeant’s posture hardened and his feet edged apart slightly. Mateo forced himself to look curious. The dragon brain in his skull felt like a furnace behind his eyes. The officer removed the feather and placed the next one, weighing eleven tens of a soul. Some people, particularly the wise and aged, could have souls within this variance.

  Mateo still weighed more.

  Was the Venetian Anubis scale more sensitive? Selvaggi himself had weighed Mateo in Genoa after implanting the augment. One soul.

  “Very odd, Don Francesco,” the old sergeant said.

  The corporal removed the feather and placed the next shining one on the scale. Mateo swayed as the plates balanced. He weighed six fifths of a soul.

  Batu! Apollo burst!

  Hot light flashed from Mateo’s skin. Men yelled, covering insulted eyes.

  Mateo leapt from the scales. The door leading deeper into the Armory was right beside him but certainly locked. No time. The alarm had been raised.

  Mateo ran to the door he’d come in by and yanked it open. He ran. Shouts sounded around him. A streak of purple light scored a column beside him. Another bloodied his arm, nearly throwing him to the cobblestones. Then he was on the streets, heart knocking loud in a hollow chest. Feet followed. Mateo plunged into the crowd. Swirling complaints eddied in his wake.

  Batu! Give me my face back!

  Mateo cast off Francesco’s surcoat and tabard. He ducked into an alley.

  He’d struck the hive but not gotten close to the honey. The bees would now be everywhere. A lesser operative would now look for his extraction contact, get across the swamps before he was caught. Youth was sometimes too quick to act. As were the Venetians. The last thing they expected him to do was to go back to the enraged hive.

  Mateo slowed as he came around the next corner, turning back towards the Temple of Odin, wearing the new face, his own. Across the plaza, all eyes were on the Palazzo. Armed men poured from the Armory. Shouts sounded in the alley he’d come through. He walked across the plaza, as calmly as any nosy gawker. He reached the temple and ordered Batu to unlock the door.

  A temple was not like a church. A temple was a state military asset. People were not welcome. There was no reason to welcome them. Odin had no relationship with anyone in Venice; he was a gibbering monster of overripe flesh and rudderless power. His worship was conducted by colonels, not priests. Worship was the application of pain, with results familiar to anyone who had ever harnessed mule to plow.

  Mateo stepped into the cool interior and closed the door behind him. Christ had been scraped from the dome and replaced with Norman artifacts and iconography. A dusty machine as large as a house dominated the center of the old basilica. Its gears and axles of ox and deer bone were quiescent, waiting for their colonels. Powered with enough blood, the machine would spin holes in the world, to where Odin floated in embryonic decay, without intent or meaning. Gunpowder waiting on fire.

  Genoa had one just like it.

  Mateo bandaged his arm quickly, cursing Selvaggi. Although he carried a dragon augment, he bled like an apprentice carrying his first goblin augment. The door handle behind him rattled. Mateo leapt into the east chapel. A man stepped in, an elite agent, like Mateo, not one of the Mantuan condottieri or Venetian regulars. Through Batu, Mateo felt other senses fluttering outward, smelling for magic. Batu wasn’t using magic, and that made Mateo invisible to any augments smelling for it. The enemy agent would have to find him with his eyes.

  The man peered into the west chapel and then paced the basilica with a suspicious step. Mateo hugged the back of a column as the agent entered the east chapel with a bare sword.

  Mateo stepped behind him on soft boots and touched him, letting Batu overwhelm both the agent and his basilisk augment. The man fell backwards. Mateo dragged him behind the column.

  Safe for the moment, but what was he to do?

  Selvaggi’s plan had gone awry. The minor cutting of Mateo’s soul had made room for Batu’s lobotomized one, but one of the two had grown. Perhaps the childlike Batu was becoming wise too quickly. If so, his curiosity was thwarting the best intelligence efforts of Genoa and had nearly gotten Mateo killed. He leaned against the wall, cradling the head of the man whose soul he was now responsible for. Like the lives of all of Genoa. He sighed.

  Batu, Mateo thought, kill his augment, silently.

  ‘Set analysis: concept, killing, contained in set designated immoral acts?’

  I need the man’s memories and soul. Do as I say.

  Mateo pulled out the man’s knife. And prayed.

  Batu, together you and I weigh six fifths of a soul. Cut away a fifth of this man’s soul, so that the three of us together weigh exactly two souls. With his clothing and appearance, we may get past their security.

  ‘Augment Batu, surgical skills: untrained.’

  Do your best.

  ‘Process: Weight verification without Anubis scale?’

  Estimate.

  ‘Projection: estimated error rate greater
than tolerances for success,” Batu said. ‘Subject’s soul not mapped by weight.’ Mateo sighed. ‘Available: weight map of Don Mateo soul, recently measured to high precision.’

  Mateo’s stomach twisted upon itself. Cut my soul again? Could he be emptied even more?

  Christ wanted something; not for Himself, but for Mateo’s soul. And Mateo had already allowed his soul to be mutilated. What harm had that cutting done him? Was his moral sense damaged? Could he receive grace anymore? He’d damned those men in the orchard, not to protect Genoa but to protect Luciana. He’d exchanged their eternity for her present. Like a god of appetite. How much grace could be poured into a cup so fouled by its owner? No act of atonement could compensate.

  The Venetian agent lay before him. His sparse whiskers and smooth face might have made him of an age with Mateo’s dead sons. His sons were gone, but perhaps, if Christ had spoken truly, they were beside the god who would not fight. Mateo, with his crimes for Genoa, might never join them, but maybe this man-boy could if Mateo would take that burden upon himself. Save Genoa. Save Luciana. Give this man-boy a chance for grace. Cut away part of his own soul, instead of the boy’s.

  How would it work, Batu? Mateo asked.

  ’Anatomical analysis: the third facet of the soul does not contain coding sequences,’ Batu answered.

  Mateo regretted his ignorance of the soul’s anatomy. Selvaggi’s surgery had been small and targeted. This suggestion was akin to asking an apprentice butcher to lop off his arm. What would he lose now?

  It didn’t matter. Luciana mattered.

  Do it, Batu.

  A very physical pain snapped inward, like a rock through stained glass.

  Disorientation. Sadness. Numbness. Nausea.

  Not at all like Selvaggi’s minor amputation.

  Mateo donned the man’s livery. Then, he put his knife to the young man’s thinly-whiskered throat.

  Hold his soul, Batu.

  ‘Emotional analysis: Don Mateo suffers from killing.’

  Hold the soul.

  The sharp knife parted the skin, the muscle, and caught on the wind pipe. Bright blood gushed. The soul joined them, in Mateo’s skull. The youth was no innocent, but Mateo’s sacrifice had kept him whole, given him a chance for grace.