Steampunk Hearts

by Jordan Reece

  Gauging from his deep drowsiness that he had only slept for a short time, Elario slid out of the saddle. The bald mechanical man guided the bay further down the drive as Elario entered the cabin. Crouched at the fireplace, Westen was stretching out a long strike-stick to the logs stacked within. Bits of paper wedged around the logs caught fire.

  The cabin contained one small room. Cobwebs were strung above, and dirt was tracked over the floor. A wash area was in the corner past the fireplace. Across from it was a rack of old clothing. Against the wall, a sheet had been thrown over a pile.

  Elario needed sleep, but his stomach complained that he needed food even more. “Are there any provisions?”

  Westen gave him a curious look from where he was poking at the fire.

  “Food,” Elario clarified.

  “Lift the sheet. There should be a few cans of food underneath. They will not be fresh.”

  Elario hung his cloak from a hook on the wall, and got down to one knee to remove the sheet. An array of oddities was underneath: two tied bedrolls, shovels and pick-axes and spades, stacks of boxes labeled as aithra bullets, a pair of pistols and a selection of old swords, a bow and quiver of arrows so aged that the quiver was coming apart. There were two weather-beaten satchels almost exactly like Elario’s, each with an adjustable strap to hold it firm, and empty flasks inside. Beside them were cans. He used a blade to pry the top from one and tipped cold beans into his mouth. Gobbling all of them down, he licked the sauce from his lips.

  The fire wasn’t yet warming the room. He took a second can and sat down directly in front of the flames to eat. Westen carried a pot outside and returned with water. Chunks of ice floated on the surface. Hanging it over the flames, he said, “We’ll purchase better food soon. This has been sitting here for years.”

  The rude mechanical man sounded a little embarrassed about the poor meal in Elario’s hands. “A man on the run doesn’t pack his pickiness with him,” Elario said. “Thank you for this. May I ask why you couldn’t keep your ammunition with you in Drouthe?”

  Westen slid his finger into the water to stir about the ice. Wiping off the drops on his dirty trousers, he said, “The sale of ammunition is tightly regulated, because it is hard to produce aithra bullets in quantity. Unless you’re in the military as a Dragon of the Blood, or a high-ranking Red Guard soldier, it is damnably difficult to get your hands on them. Even nobles cannot get them with ease. To be found with aithra bullets, or suspected of trying to acquire them, turns eyes to you. Some people have pistols and a box or two of ammunition left over from before the regulations, but it is safe to say that none have a few hundred bullets like I have here.”

  Finishing the beans, Elario set the second can aside and removed the eye patch. His head turned to a strange, slight pull from down the hill, a tumble of voices and faces flashing through his mind. It occurred to him that he had been feeling that pull since Hobbe woke him. “This is madness.”

  “Perhaps it is not,” Westen said contemplatively. “What is it you’re experiencing?”

  Elario was sitting on the floor in the cabin, yet flying over a very different scene. “They’re searching for me in the Grand Market. Soldiers of the Red Guard. I see them stopping at the stalls to ask the dealers if they have seen me.” The heads of the herb dealers nodded and shook in turn. Yes, they knew a man named Master Elario Repse very well! But no, they had not seen him in some time.

  Penborough fell away to Alming. “As well are they near my home, awaiting my return. They are watching all to turn in at the crossroads . . . They have taken rooms at the Sixes, and Conton Evry has been ordered to give over any post addressed to Repse. He . . . I see him nodding nervously, and insisting the only package to arrive lately was herbs. Herbs and farm implements in the past . . . Every day, soldiers go to my home to speak with my houseman and his son.” Yens greeted them kindly each time, as if their presence was welcome; Nyca’s face was colder than ice.

  “These are things you see before you right now?” Westen asked.

  Elario blinked and new scenes flashed in and out. There was Hydon Repse, older and stockier, swathed in furs and driving a wagon upon an unpaved road along a mountain slope. This was from farther in the past than the Grand Market search. A sudden rip in the air turned into an arrow, embedding itself into the dirt before the horses. Hydon reined them in before putting up his hands with palms uplifted to show goodwill. It was a Hethai gesture that he adopted for his own, and it amused them and pleased them in turn.

  At the very same time, Elario was creeping through a narrow passageway of rock with the roof scored by smoke. The air was still, drawn unwillingly into his lungs when it wanted to be as solid as the rock to envelop it. “I’m going to the dragons,” he heard himself say, vaguely aware of the log cabin, yet unable to see it.

  We don’t know if Repse actually has the weapon!

  Why else would the Hethai have chased him back to Rathgate?

  For many reasons! He could have taken on with one of their women!

  He has a woman in town, or did! Where are she and her child?

  Elario was hearing the voices, and harshly speaking their argument through his own throat. Then all of it ceased.

  He was still seated upon the dirty floor, the heat baking into his body. Westen was filling the basin from the wash area with the pot of water. The ice had melted. “How can this not be madness?” Elario cried at him.

  “You witness not fictions but truth,” Westen said.

  “I should witness neither!”

  “Hydon was seen leaving the caves, I assume. Nothing would have outraged the Hethai more than to come across him trespassing upon their sacred ground. They pursued him back to Rathgate, but he got there before they did, and their people refuse to enter the town under any circumstances.”

  Feverishly wishing for the eye to be still, Elario said, “Those were Red Guard speaking of him.”

  “Yes. The presence of a multitude of angry Hethai just outside the town wall would warn them that something was gravely amiss. The Red Guard stationed in the mountain towns are ordered to keep watch on traders, though none of them understand the truth of why. They are just told the Hethai have powerful magical objects given to them long ago by the dragons, objects with the ability to destroy all of Phaleros if unleashed. The Hethai do not use them as long as their mountain home is left alone, but traders, perhaps working on behalf of those with ambitions of the throne, sometimes try to steal them.”

  Westen carried the sloshing basin to the corner. “Hydon had to act fast once he was within the wall. Maybe he gave the dragon’s eye in its package to his woman for her to post.”

  “Who was this woman?”

  “A companion. She followed her husband to Rathgate, as Hydon wrote me ten years ago, where he was to be postmaster. But he took ill and died soon after arrival, leaving her with a young daughter to support. Colette took over the position of postmistress, which is not a great task in a small town like that, though she was barely literate. She also worked as Hydon’s cook.”

  Elario saw and heard nothing, but knew these things as truth. An advantageous connection, to his uncle’s way of thinking. It did not hurt that the widowed woman was comely, most amenable to his attentions, and as disinterested in the particulars of the post to arrive and depart as Conton Evry was interested.

  “Before he was arrested, he gave her two sacks of gold and had her flee Rathgate with her child,” Elario stated, finding the knowledge inexplicably lodged in his mind. “Soldiers are looking for her, too.”

  “I expect so. I hope she and her daughter have flown far and fast.”

  Over in the wash area, Westen was disrobing. He was very decidedly muscled in the shoulders and back, and a rush of blood went through Elario’s veins as Westen dropped his trousers to reveal taut buttocks. Elario turned back to the fire immediately. To react like that to a facsimile of a man . . . Elario was ashamed of himself.

  He tried not to hear the splashing of water
over skin. “If the dragons are so long gone, how is it that I bear a dragon’s eye?” he asked.

  “Dragons were not beings of flesh and blood as you, or not entirely,” Westen said. “They were made of aithra as well, much more aithra than the most talented knacker holds within to power his or her ability.”

  “Knackers hold aithra?”

  There was a grumble from the corner. “You ask too many questions, farm boy. Aithra is energy that knackers harness in different ways, and push into other things to power them. It can be an instrument or a mathematical equation; it can be a mechanical man or aerial or other scientific wonder; it can be in building or healing or dying and so on. With dragons, a dragon’s body does not decay as that of a man’s; of the last of their race to die, what is made dust takes more time than has passed in this world. In those caves, which are cool and dry, protected from the elements, and with aithra mitigating, the decay is slowed to a crawl.”

  “What is this eye doing to me? It’s not just visions and voices but . . .” Elario cringed at the memory of the dock in Ballevue. “I saw a dervesh, or what I thought was a dervesh, where it should not be.”

  “You are being affected by dragon senses. In the old stories of the Hethai and the Ponto, the mind of a dragon is not rooted to one time and one place. It drifts upon-”

  “A sea,” Elario finished. “A sea where water is not water but time.”

  “And this dervesh you saw?”

  “It was following behind a woman as placid as a puppy. No one saw it but I. The thing was tall and had burned, rotting skin. No nose and the forehead had fallen down over its eye. Is that a dervesh?”

  “Yes. It was a spakka. Tell me of this woman. She was dressed well.”

  How had Westen known that? “Yes! She was dressed in green velvet with hoops, and wore a fancy choker that dropped a pearl pendant.” Without thinking, Elario looked over his shoulder. Westen had wrapped a cloth around his waist and was scrubbing at his hair.

  “The choker was a spelled object,” Westen said over the splashing. “She may not realize what it is she wears, or how it services her, though most like her do realize, in my experience. The dervesh knackers of old made that choker.”

  Elario just shook his head at that.

  “I know what your silence says, that you think I speak heresy or lunacy or both, but yes, there were dervesh knackers. The skill appeared only within children of two Great Cities. Never were there more than four or five knackers of that variety alive at the same time, always born on the southern side of Nevenin and the northern side of Olehalem. Half of them were so weak as to be inconsequential. Dervesh knackers created many spelled objects, each one harnessing a corruption of energy to the wearer’s advantage. The woman you saw . . . misfortune befalls those who cross her, for a spakka enacts vengeance. Her anger will give it the fuel to step away from her choker and attack.”

  Elario believed in the reality of spelled objects, but could not accept that there had ever been such a thing as a dervesh knacker. “She does not see it?”

  Westen wrung out his hair into the basin. Then he retrieved his smallclothes and pulled them back on, Elario looking away to give him privacy. “No. Only the victim will as he or she is sent to an untimely grave. The Corpse King had a deep and justified fear of one of these spelled objects selecting him as its victim. He forbade the making of them and set his soldiers to confiscating them from the populace. They were locked away in the royal treasury in Ruzan. But some pieces escaped them even so, and others were stolen from the treasury by nobles with light fingers. They are perfect, yes, these weapons. It is too hard to trace the path between the victim, who has lost money or life or something else, to the one who relieved him of it.”

  The door opened to admit Hobbe, who crossed the room to wash his hands in the basin of water. At the rack of clothes, Westen picked through them. The trousers and shirts had been nibbled on by rodents; he selected the least affected and dressed.

  “How much ammunition do you wish for me to pack, sir?” Hobbe inquired.

  “As much as we are physically able to carry, which should be all of it,” Westen said. “Let’s leave all but the short swords behind; it’s becoming a strange sight for a common man to walk around the golden ring with a sword hanging off his hip or a bow over his shoulder.”

  Sleeping in the saddle had done little to restore Elario. If anything, he felt worse for it. He laid out a bedroll at the fire while the mechanical men sorted through the weaponry. Placing the pistol next to his rolled travel blanket, which he was using as a pillow, he got comfortable and closed his eyes. The fire crackled soothingly.

  “With what weapons are you adept, farm boy?” Westen asked.

  “None,” Elario confessed. Archery was a Hallowmas contest, and while he was proficient at hitting the target, he was typically far off from center. Game hunters always won those competitions. As for swords, he was even less acquainted. His boyhood heroics at whacking other children with sticks went unmentioned.

  “We’ll just teach him how to shoot a pistol,” Westen said to Hobbe, who murmured assent. “Give me those explosives. We can’t put them in your chest cavity. If you overheat, the consequences will be most unfortunate.”

  “Will you sell me to a mechanical man menagerie then, sir?”

  “Yes, all five thousand charred pieces of you.”

  “That will take a long time to collect, sir.”

  “It is a joke, Hobbe. An absurdity. In truth, it is most wise of me to not give you a sense of humor. It allows me the delusion that I have amusing things to say, and spares you the pain of the polite smile.”

  “Forgiveness, sir. I do not understand.”

  Elario sat up. He was still feeling that slight tug from down the hill, just as he had felt that tug into the field outside Drouthe. “Do you know what it is that draws me?”

  “It is dragon calling to dragon,” Westen said. “There are dragon bones deep within the earth of Phaleros, those who did not perish in the caves.”

  Dragon bones. Elario restrained a sigh of exasperation. He turned to the fire and tried to sleep. Dragon calling to dragon, though both dragons were dead, one just an eye and the other naught but bones or dust in the dirt. Dragons and soldiers and mad kings and dervesh knackers . . .

  Go, boy. A woman in an apron bent down over Elario, flour whitening her hands and coating a silver bit in her fingers. Her long hair was twined around her head in a thick, graying braid, and behind her was a cavernous kitchen where others were hard at work. Go, boy, and run fast! I don’t have time with all of these guests! Cloves and nutmeg and don’t dally on the way!

  It was a dream or a memory or something else entirely. Elario spun on his heel and fled the kitchen, joyous to be running, the coin held in his unbreakable grip. Down the steps through the terraced garden he flew. The mahogany spice carriage was at the foot of the drive, bells jingling along the roof. The sound thrilled him; he was supposed to be in the study listening to the drone of the mathematics scholar that the master hired for the spring. Brother Onaz was so dull that twice he fell asleep amidst his own lessons, the six of them giggling at their slates and drawing pictures in place of fractions.

  He loathed his lessons, so this unexpected errand was a grace. The boy leaped the last steps to the drive and sprinted for the carriage. Repse was inked in gold along the side, the letters tilted like wind was blowing them away. Gripping the coin even more tightly, the boy ran pell-mell to the open back door.

  Then he was breathing deeply as the spice man filled his order. Pepper pricked at his nose as he looked about at all the ground spices in their glass and clay jars. Whole spices were in leather bags. A cluck of reproach made him pull back his finger from the mortar and pestle on a shelf by the door. The boy did so smartly. This was the second time he had been entrusted with this task, since he was only eight years old, and he wanted to continue it.

  He blinked and was back in the kitchen, giving over the spices and coppers as change. All
of the cooks and their helpers were in an uproar, as they had been since yesterday. The lord had a bad habit of inviting guests to visit without informing anyone, and the staff had to scurry so that the Inamon name was not brought to shame.

  Inamon. Elario saw his reflection in the window over the sink.

  A boy with blond hair and bright blue eyes looked back.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Again, sir,” Hobbe said.

  Elario took aim through his normal eye at the can upon the tree stump. His finger pressed lightly upon the trigger as he shifted, squinting, and then he pulled. The blast was sharp and loud. His arm rocked back with the recoil.

  Once again, he missed. He had missed his target with all six bullets. Tipping out the chambers, he accepted a fresh load of aithra bullets from the mechanical man and slid them in. “I am terrible at this.”

  The two of them were behind the log cabin and practicing in the late afternoon sunlight. The horses were tied around the other side to keep them from spooking at the ruckus. They had spent the day grazing on the hilltop, and drinking from the water Hobbe pumped from a well. Still inside the cabin, Westen was selecting what he wished to take along and how to carry it. They were leaving at first light tomorrow for the golden ring.

  The easiest way to do that was to first head south to the city of Reves, since there were few roads out here in this wilderness. However, soldiers were undoubtedly watching for Elario in Reves, as it was hard to get to Drouthe without passing through Reves first. That left them to cow paths and old roads like the one through the abandoned boom towns to reach the city of Cathul instead, adding miles through rough terrain to their travels. This worried Westen as well, because the closer they got to Cathul, the more open the land became. Should soldiers be spying down from aerials, the three of them would be exposed to the sky as they approached the city.