Ceaseless Steam: Steampunk Stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine

by Scott Andrews (Editor)

  “You lie still and pretend I knocked you out,” I whispered, patting him on his stubble-covered cheek. Then I dragged him aside while the rest of the mob flowed in, thumping me on the back and calling me a good ‘un as their wary eyes flitted back and forth. I nodded to the reverend and looked around.

  It was dark, that was the first thing; darker than a factoryman’s heart. The watchman’s lantern hung on a hook by the door and cast a small circle of light that was just enough to reveal a low-hanging ceiling and a vast darkness beyond. The humming was louder inside; I could feel it all the way down to my bones. It made me nauseous and a little frightened, as though its relentless vibration sought to dislodge something inside me that I couldn’t live without.

  “We need light,” someone muttered. “It’s too bloody dark in here.”

  I unhooked the lantern and everyone looked at me as I swung it around and searched the room. This was a labourer’s entrance; there had to be more lanterns nearby. And there they were, sitting in a row along a low wooden shelf. In moments we had them lit with lucifer matches and makeshift tapers, illuminating the room.

  A narrow door stood on our left, leading into what I guessed was the applicants’ room. Halls ran to the right and left. Between them was a central square protected by a chest-high brick wall and a cross-hatch of heavy iron bars that ran from the top of the wall to the ceiling.

  “It’s the collection jars,” a woman exclaimed. “Look, that’s where they store the vitty.”

  We crowded forward to peer through the narrow apertures. The heavy, pale ceramic jars stood about as tall as a young child and were set side-by-side on wooden pallets. A black galvanics lighting bolt had been stencilled on the side of each jar, along with the legend “Millside Collection Station” and a cryptic sequence of numbers. Iron rods thrust down from the low ceiling into the top of each container.

  We tested the bars, but they were stout and immobile, as was the door in the brick wall. The crowbar slammed against the door handle a few times, to no avail.

  “They must keep the applicants upstairs,” I mused, following the pipes with my eyes to the point where they vanished into the ceiling. “Does anyone see a stairwell?”

  The mob revitalised. A few threw open the door to the application office and rummaged through the desks and bookcases while others charged down the hallways, their lanterns setting shadows frolicking across the walls like demons.

  “Here!” someone bellowed. “The stairs are over here!”

  We rushed up the steps in an unruly horde, lanterns high and voices higher. But one by one our voices fell silent as we reached the top, until the last of us stepped off the stairwell into a horrified hush.

  The buzzing, shadow-filled chamber housed hundreds of lustreless silver cases lined up in neat rows two feet apart, like metal tombs enclosed inside some electrified technological mausoleum.

  Each case stood four feet off the ground, with hinges on one side and a latch on the other and a sliding metal panel set in the top quarter of the lid. Dark metal pipes emerged from the bottoms and ran along the length of the floor, converging in the centre of the room and plunging through an opening to the collection containers below.

  The oppressive vibration of the galvanic process made my skin prickle and my teeth grind together. I pressed a fist against my heart and saw that I wasn’t alone. A number of other reformers and curiosity-seekers hugged themselves, too, some with both arms, as though fearing their chests might burst asunder from the numinous pressure.

  “There aren’t any names,” one of the younger men said, looking around with dismay. “Just numbers. Where are the names?”

  “Do they all have people inside?” a woman asked, her voice hushed, as if hoping one of us might deny the obvious.

  “Of course they do,” I replied with grim assurance, for I recognised a coffin when I saw one. I approached the case closest to me: Number 21. The sliding panel was perforated, and small, narrow vents ran along the sides of the box to its midpoint.

  I set my lantern on the next case and slid Number 21’s perforated panel to one side. It was easier than cracking a hole in the lid with a pickaxe.

  If only the incessant humming would stop.

  The woman’s eyes were closed and sunken, and her mouth was covered by a canvas mask from which a wax-coated tube extended. Her skin was sallow and her eyes moved back and forth under their lids. I caught a glimpse of her head, covered with a short black stubble.

  “Dear God,” the Reverend Brant breathed, moving next to me and crossing himself. Others edged up around us. “Is she asleep?”

  “Why aren’t there any names?” the young man asked again, sounding anguished.

  “Who cares?” I snapped, glaring up at him. “They’re as good as dead, anyway.”

  “My mum sold herself to the Works two weeks ago.” The young man’s voice cracked. “How can I find her if there aren’t any names?”

  Discomfited, I dipped my head closer to the woman’s face. I smelled the sour reek of unwashed flesh and the sewer scent of beshitten fabric, and over both the stronger, acrid odour of laudanum.

  “She’s been drugged,” I reported. “Opium. That must be how they keep them quiet.”

  “Now, that would be worth something,” the man with the crowbar muttered, looking around. “Where do you suppose they keep it?”

  Several of the less reform-minded members of the mob joined him in his search, while others spread through the room and apprehensively reached for the sliding panels on the silver lids.

  I leaned over Number 21 and inspected the feeding tube until I figured out how to disengage it from the wires that fastened it to the lid. The latch on the case was a simple hook-and-eye affair, no more than necessary to keep the metal lid from rattling. I flicked it aside and lifted the lid. The vibration grew stronger, shivering me from balls to brainpan.

  She was naked, her body wasted by starvation and, I supposed, a loss of vitae. A thin sheet was wrapped around her thighs like a child’s nappy, stained and soiled. Her wrists and ankles were held down by large padded leather straps, and I saw a leather pad on the cover of the case, right over her forehead. As I watched, she jerked, one arm slapping against the strap that held it down.

  The mirrored panels inside the silver case oscillated with captive energy. Gleaming wires coiled around her limbs like a tangled net, running from circular openings in the bottom of the case to small ceramic funnels resting on the woman’s body: on the top of her head, on her forehead, over her throat, over her heart, over her diaphragm, over her womb, and under the fabric covering her thighs. The limp feeding tube dangled obscenely from her mouth against her flattened breasts.

  I wondered if Number 21 felt any pain, afloat on opium dreams while her vitae was siphoned away on copper wires.

  “I found the drugs!” someone shouted. A moment later metal struck metal. Cries to be careful rose up among the onlookers.

  I pressed my hand against my chest again, my fingers clutching my ragged coat collar. My bladder felt full and my back teeth ached. The vibrations from the case were stealing my breath away and seemed eager to take more.

  I dragged my hand away from my chest and lifted one of the ceramic funnels. It resisted. I tugged and saw that it covered the ends of wires that had been inserted into the woman’s flesh, surrounded by suppurating lesions. I touched the naked copper and gasped as a galvanic shock ran through me, making my heart stutter and my muscles convulse. Horrified, I wrenched myself away with the primal desperation of a rat whose leg has been caught in a steel gin trap.

  Behind me, voices rose in a cheer as the lock on the medicine cabinet broke off. A deep-voiced man began to read labels and pass around bottles. I heard ‘tincture of laudanum’ called out multiple times, to shouts of acclaim. Compound oxygen, iron bitters, and a variety of other elixirs and patent medicines were also received with general approbation. The factorymen took care of their charges at least as well as any hospital.

  Still sha
king, I lowered the lid and re-engaged the latch. Then I lifted the feeding tube and hooked it back up to its wire support and slid the panel shut over Number 21’s face.

  The metal lid vibrated under my hands, and a peculiar emptiness ached inside my chest.

  The world had changed; I realised that, now. Inside this dark, buzzing, technological shrine to science, where one person’s death meant another’s immortality, there was no room left for an old-fashioned resurrection man with old-fashioned values.

  The Reverend Brant stood a few rows away from me, his expression bleak, and I wondered if he, too, was considering the obsolescence of his profession. For what did God have to offer a world in which immortality was bought and sold at a manufactory’s cold iron gate?

  ~ ~ ~

  We took the medicines and the copper wire and the lanterns and anything else that might fetch a few shillings on the second-hand market, and then we cut some of the more pathetic living skeletons out of their metal cases and carried them into the neighbourhood bars and taverns. The Reverend Brant pointed toward their unconscious, bleeding bodies and harangued the crowd about the unforgivable evil being perpetrated on the poor to benefit the rich. Outrage spread, as outrage does, and eventually it turned into violence.

  The body I’d carried out of the Millside manufactory had felt light, almost insubstantial, in my arms. I abandoned it when the rioting started and ducked through the tavern’s kitchen, nicking a carving knife on my way out. Several hours later, I had new bodies to carry, bodies that felt much heavier as I loaded them into a barrow from the manufactory courtyard.

  “Victims of the riots?” the night porter asked, holding up a lantern and peering at them from the back door of the hospital where I’d once worked and still plied my trade.

  “Seemed a waste to let the constables haul ‘em off to a pauper’s grave,” I said piously, “when their misfortune might do some good for science, instead.”

  The night porter gave a cynical snort and waved me in, asking no more, and after I’d laid the bodies out in the hospital morgue, he counted their worth into my waiting palm. Each coin glinted like an electrical spark, and I felt a surge of satisfaction at having stolen a little life of my own out from under the noses of the rich.

  Wasn’t but two days later, the morning after I paid the Reverend Brant a corpse’s price to bury my Bet in one of those private, guarded cemeteries, that Lizzie and I stood on the crowded train platform, holding crisp paper tickets out of the city to a place where the air was fresh and the dead lie motionless in their graves. Choking clouds of ash and steam billowed around us, and shrill train whistles pierced the air. With my sack of digging tools bundled up next to me and the carving knife jammed into my boot, I pulled my daughter close and squeezed her shoulder. She looked up at me with a tentative, uncertain smile.

  I still don’t know what, exactly, those manufactories are collecting inside their damnable ceramic jars. The Reverend Brant believes vitae is the human soul, but if that’s the case, then a soul is a heavy thing, indeed. As for me, I’ve been feeling agreeably light of heart ever since I set foot within that dark Millside manufactory.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Dru Pagliassotti is a horror and fantasy writer and the owner of The Harrow Press. She's written a steampunk fantasy novel, Clockwork Heart (Juno Books, 2008) and a horror novel, An Agreement with Hell (Apex Book Company, 2010). In real life, she’s a professor of communication at California Lutheran University, where she researches boys’ love manga and fiction. She blogs intermittently about all of these things at drupagliassotti.com.

  ARCHITECTURAL CONSTANTS

  Yoon Ha Lee

  The city

  THE CITIZENS OF THE SILKLANDS have no name for the city. There are other cities upon the world’s wheel. There are others more celebrated, whether for the rooted topiary birds that line their boulevards, or their sparkling, inverted fountains of wine. Others have taller spires with which to focus the unlight of the phantom moon, or deeper dungeons with which to contain the abysses of desire.

  In any of these cities, you may mention the city or the architect, its restless Spider, and no listener will fail to understand which city you mean. The city lies at the intersection of leys that move through seas and continents, and stretch into the vastness beyond the visible stars. The city extends upwards and downwards in preposterous arches and chasm-spanning bridges.

  If you listen during the silence following the city’s curfew bells, you can hear the click-click-clicking of the Spider’s slide rule as she checks her calculations.

  ~ ~ ~

  The librarian

  Eskevan Three of Thorns had dropped his lensgear in the gutter. Twice he had been splashed by murky water while determining the best way to retrieve the lens. He had another hour before the water started circulating. Having sullied the yellow-trimmed coat that declared him a licensed librarian, Eskevan felt doubly reluctant either to remove his gauntlets or to plunge them into the water.

  There the lensgear gleamed, polished and precise. Enough dithering. He would have to hope that no one questioned his credentials tonight. The master archivist always said a shabby librarian was no librarian at all, but it could not be helped.

  Other parts of the city boasted libraries of indexed splendor. Other librarians handled nothing more threatening than curling vellum and tame, untarnished treatises. Eskevan did not aspire to any such thing. In the dimmest hours, he admitted that he exulted in the wayward winds and the grime underfoot, the heady knowledge of the paths words traveled.

  He had heard the whispers up and down the city’s tiers, and the whispers distilled into a single warning: The Spider ascends. Eskevan, who lived merely three tiers underground, a child of the chasm’s kindly shallows, could not fathom the depths to which the city descended or the vast distances that the Spider must traverse.

  The Spider governed the city’s processes, designing new foundations to withstand the weight of condensed dreams, or selecting the materials that would best gird the city’s gates. If the Spider had roused, it implied that the city was in dire need of restructuring. Eskevan had no desire to involve himself in such troubles.

  A trolley approached, sleek and metal-slick. Eskevan plunged into the water and grabbed the lensgear, lifting it clear of the muck.

  He imagined that he could feel the effluent seeping purposefully through his boots and socks and the neatly tucked hems of his pants. Feel it canvassing the surface composition of his skin, mapping every pore and uncomfortable callus. Feel it molding his feet into shapes meant to tread alien, unstable shores.

  Eskevan stood rooted and terrified and cold as the trolley whisked past. He breathed its exhalations of sterile vapor with relief, then scrambled out of the sewer. He wiped the soles of his boots against the street’s gritty surface and shook his gauntlets free of water. From a coat pocket he withdrew gossamer cloth and wiped the precious lensgear. The cloth absorbed the effluent. He blew it away; it dispersed into seedsilk strands, each of these unraveling in the unquiet air.

  Closer inspection suggested that the lensgear had not suffered damage. All its facets and toothy edges remained intact. It was easier to break a man than a lensgear. Their values were appraised accordingly.

  A cat watched him from a doorway, its gaze slitted and bright. He wished it would go away.

  Eskevan closed his left eye and turned to the patchwork of cracks along the walls of the tenement. He stopped. He scrutinized the insolent cat.

  Through the lensgear, he saw no cat. The gear click-click-clicked through its several apertures. His teeth vibrated; he clenched his jaw. Each time, Eskevan saw the loose, flat outline of a cat. A paper cutout, if paper could reproduce such glittering eyes.

  Eskevan opened his left eye and let ordinary vision reassert itself. He returned his attention to the wall. Graffiti was broken into illegibility by the cracks. Inside the gauntlets, his hands tingled. He used the lensgear again. Amid the tangle of slurs and obscene jokes, he found a single shining
line of poetry. With the assurance of long practice, Eskevan reached for the words.

  To his astonishment, the words flared white and gold, and whistled from his grasp, leaving him holding an inky afterimage. Eskevan swore. Fumbling one-handed, he opened his capture tome and pinned the afterimage onto the page. It seethed before settling into dark, angry spikes.

  The line read: The Spider ascends, except “Spider” was misspelled. That simple fact made Eskevan’s stomach clench.

  It seemed he was going to be involved whether he liked it or not.

  ~ ~ ~

  The sentinel

  Attavudhra Nought of Glass stood at the entrance to the city’s nexus, holding a pistol-bow in one hand. It was a thing of tension and angles, of parabolic urges. At her back was a curved sword. Behind her, light shifted. She whirled and shot.

  The captain of the guard, Yaz Five of Masks, let the arrow embed itself in his shield. “It would have hit my heart,” he said.

  “It did not,” Attavudhra said. She had dueled and defeated her comrades in the guards’ trials. She had trained cadets to combative excellence. She was agonizingly close to being able to best Yaz.

  His tone was amused: “And that’s why you don’t hold my position.” He drew his own sword, which split Attavudhra’s second arrow, then blocked the sweep of her blade. She did not counterattack. Here, now, she was a mirror to his intention, thwarting his motions and nothing more.

  Yaz stepped back and relaxed his guard. So did she. “It suffices,” he said. Then, to her bewilderment, he asked, “Have you been dreaming?”

  Attavudhra never remembered her dreams or thought of her past. She said nothing. Guard training was the single lens through which she saw the world. Everything else was irrelevant.

  Yaz’s smile twisted. “Of course not. Come.”

  Another guard came to take Attavudhra’s post. For a second, his image blurred, and it was as though she saw two men standing where one should be, one short and one tall, one fair and one dark. Attavudhra glanced at Yaz, but if he noticed, he gave no sign. I must be imagining it, she thought.