Steampunk Hearts

by Jordan Reece

  “They’re staring at us,” Sinclair said about the children, who watched unabashedly from the garden with their sketches forgotten. “Always, always, they stare at us. Do they know what you do, the little ones, or do they think that I am arresting you once or twice a month?”

  “They are well aware of what I do. It is the one-way glass that draws their eyes,” Jesco said. “They’re from farm country, many of them, and a glass of this kind is beyond their kenning.” He had once lived in a place such as that, where advancement did not penetrate and the tales of it were deemed nonsense or devilry.

  “And are they all othelin like you?” Sinclair queried.

  “Othelin, yes, but not all like me. I was the only seer in that party.”

  “What are the rest?”

  “Kineticists, manipulators, and telescopics.”

  The horse turned smoothly at the corner and merged into the traffic there. “I hope this day has found you well,” Sinclair said formally.

  “It has,” Jesco said. “But not so well for another, I presume.”

  Sinclair blanched at even such an oblique reference to the deceased. “No, not so well. Not so well at all.”

  It was best to approach the issue gently, which Jesco had learned over time would win him the most information from the junior detective. Theolodus Sinclair did like to chat, if one only found the right route to encourage his words to flow. “When did this case come to the attention of the force?”

  “At dawn,” Sinclair answered readily. “A tramp made the discovery in an alley and came to the station, where he caused quite a commotion. It was first assumed to be ravings induced by alcohol, but he was so specific and insistent that two patrolmen were dispatched to investigate. One stayed there when it proved truth; the second hurried back to the station to alert the detectives.”

  “Has the scene been disturbed?”

  “Fortunately, no. For love or money, few but a drunken tramp will trespass into Poisoners’ Lane in Wattling.”

  Poisoners’ Lane! Along the riverside in Wattling had long been a site of great industry and crushing poverty entwined, but the factories and tenements alike were now silent. The water was beginning to clear years later without fresh deposits of chemical waste dumped into it, but people had not returned to live there. The ground was poisoned, the bricks and wood and metal of the buildings, with kolymbium. Alchemy was the science of weak minds, resting upon its dubious laurels with phrenology and astrology and homeopathy, but likewise so powerful that it had arrested several city blocks in the matters of life entirely. The greatest devastation had been on Poisoners’ Lane itself. The half-life of kolymbium was very long indeed, and no one in Jesco’s lifetime would ever be able to dwell there.

  “Is it safe for us to investigate?” Jesco asked in concern.

  “Yes, not to worry,” Sinclair said. “We consulted the chemist on retainer as soon as we learned that it was not a tramp’s morbid fantasies. Safe to study the . . . scene, safe to take what evidence we may find, so long as it has not been there long.” His hanging cheeks drained of what little color they had regained. “As to the body, should it appear to have been there for some period of time, she suggested that we not let it linger overlong with the coroner. It should be examined and removed to the facility at Pine Cross post-haste. They have the means to deal with it there.”

  “Did you see the tramp yourself?” Jesco asked. “Did you find him suspicious?”

  “I spoke with him for more information immediately upon the return of the patrolman. I do not think he would report a man in whose departure from this world he was responsible.”

  “Ah, but he wouldn’t be the first, would he? The Praying Mantis was such a sort: killing his victims, and then reporting the remains so that he might win accolades for finding them. That was before I began to assist, but I have heard of him in the station.”

  Sinclair considered this as he glanced out the window to the shops. “The Mantis Man, yes, he had cold eyes. So cold, cold and flat, like twin lakes of ice beneath an overcast sky. I remember him well. His last strike happened in my third year at the station. His lips all a’tremble, he wrung his kerchief and looked like he was in the straits of utter misery as he relayed to us what he had found. But his eyes caught me again and again, those icy eyes that all his distress did not touch.”

  This was one of the reasons that Sinclair had gotten the promotion. For all his delicate nature, he was keenly attuned to subtle incongruence, and that was a necessity in a homicide detective. The Praying Mantis had created his first discovery in his boyhood years and basked in the newspaper articles about his bravery. A cry! A most terrible cry he had heard in the night, but where others shrank in their beds, this brave son of a railroad engineer girded himself with blade and boots and sought it out in his nightdress. But too late, too late had he come to save the woman in the woods, whose body was blackening within a fire.

  This had happened in the small town of Switch, and the unsolved murder obsessed all of western Ainscote for months. Then it faded, pushed into the background behind fresher crimes. The Praying Mantis moved far away from Switch, supplied himself with a new identity, and let Time carve him into a man. It was not until he was well into his thirties that he did it again, murdering a woman and dumping her body into a lake just before it froze over. In the spring, this clerk of haberdashery was in the news for spying something curious in the water and paddling a boat over to see what it was. A torso! That was all that remained. Once again, he basked in the attention of his gruesome find, and nobody connected the balding man who sold pins and bobbins to the son of the railroad engineer two decades in the past and hundreds of miles away.

  Yet again he moved, changed his identity, and waited for Time to transform him. Sinclair had encountered him in his elder years, enormously fat and reeking of cigars, a respectable man of business with a wife and a son at university. Without the junior detective’s diffident assertions that all was not as it appeared, the murderer might have gotten away with it for a third time. Now the Praying Mantis in his dotage resided in a cell within Crofthollow Prison, and guards regularly relieved him of contraband in the form of articles about his crimes. The murders he had committed had only been a means to experience his true thrill of gaining attention, and that was the greatest atrocity of all.

  Sinclair was also remembering the crimes of the cold-hearted murderer, and murmured, “Thrice! Thrice it turned out that he had done this. I cannot fathom it.” The carriage slowed, stopped, and picked up speed. He returned to the case at hand. “The tramp’s eyes were clear. A fallen man, a despairing man, but I believe him to be an honest man. He was much too intoxicated to be cunning. He was taking Poisoners’ Lane as a shortcut to reach the Archangel Micalo Indigent Home on Selbie Road. His aim was only for a cot to sleep the sunlight hours away. It’s a penny for a cot by night and a half-penny by day. If he had aught to do with this, it would be to my astonishment.”

  Jesco trusted the detective’s instincts and they fell into silence. The scenery out the glass grew grimmer as the carriage came to Wattling, which was the poorest area in all of Cantercaster. Children in rags played in the lanes, wet from a recent rain, and drunks sagged against walls with bottles pinched between their thighs. A fellow in dirty but fine clothing came in ecstatic paroxysms to the carriage, where he pounded on the sides and ran alongside it with his feet kicking up the water from puddles. He shouted incoherently. Jesco caught a glimpse of his maddened eyes, which could not see in but that did not matter. The man was clearly soaring high upon the wings of rucaline, and he was seeing what was not there. Recoiling from the window, Sinclair said, “It cannot be weeded out, the twists and turns that bring that damned hallucinogenic here.”

  “I know very little about rucaline. But they are brought to the asylum now and again, people ruined by it,” Jesco said. “They’re placed in another ward, so I do not often have dealings with them.” Sometimes he saw them strapped into wheelchairs, ostensibly being taken out
for a pleasant stroll through the garden, but they were drooling, slant-eyed, and unaware of their surroundings.

  Less shrinking in the matter of drug trafficking than he was with murder, Sinclair said, “Once, just once, can hook a soul upon rucaline forever. It is an evil made manifest. Grown in Brozzo to the south, and in the Sarasasta Islands, those lace flowers. The growers take care to keep their farms well hidden in the forests. The properties of the drug are in the seedpods, like opiates, but the effect is not at all similar. Picked, treated, and smuggled here in small cakes, they are shattered and sold and snorted. One small cake is worth many thousands of dollars since each individual dose is so miniscule. And never the same, its strength, and the strongest can relieve a person of all sensibilities permanently. The body lives on but the mind has vacated. The Drug Administration does what it can to staunch the flow of rucaline into the country. But where one head is cut off, three more sprout in its place.”

  The autohorse clipped faster down the road and the drugged man fell away. Jesco looked out the back window to see him sprawled in a puddle and laughing with insanity. He had done all of that running without shoes, and was oblivious to his lacerated feet. “I wonder what he sees,” Jesco said, for all he saw was a pathetic sight in a man of means, his clothes torn and stained, laying helpless in an area famous for its proliferation of pickpockets.

  “He sees grandness, and that is why he does it,” Sinclair said. “They are brought into the station to dry out in the tank, weaving tales of knights and dragons and glory, maidens or gentlemen fair, cracking their knuckles on the bars and walls of the cell and believing them dastardly assailants. They are heroes in their own minds for the length of the intoxication, and they love themselves for it and believe themselves to be loved. This is why they cannot find temperance. They wish to stay within these fantasies forever. It is an endless loop of flying high, coming down and remembering how they acted without comport, and desiring to fly high again to forget how their conscience pricks. This goes on and on until they die or else stumble into a bolus dose that destroys their sanity.”

  Grimmer still was the scenery out the glass. “A rich man’s delight, rucaline,” Sinclair said. “The rest keep to opium.” Such a den was outside: a squat gray establishment hunkered down between taller buildings and with bursts of fake poppies around the door to indicate what one could find within. There was a room within the brothel Jesco patronized on occasion that was for the smoking of opium. Though curious, he had never entered it, and Collier warned him not to create a problem where there was none. For Collier’s sake, Jesco would avoid it. That beautiful man knew much more about opium from working there than Jesco did from his sporadic visits. Leave opium to the sick and broken for pain relief; there was no need for Jesco to have it.

  The traffic had ended. Now the carriage was passing through slums peopled only by shadows. This was the dead zone. All was silent except for the dulled sounds of the autohorse’s hooves and the rattling of the wheels. Although they had the assurance of the chemist, nervousness filled Jesco to be nearing Poisoners’ Lane. It had been fifteen years since anyone called this area home, fifteen years since those terrifying articles appeared in the newspapers of the bodies in the streets and the tenements, still sitting at tables over meager meals and sagging in corners. One did not feel sick upon exposure. One did not feel sick at all, and then hours later, Death suddenly came knocking. The Church had taken advantage of the fall of thousands, blaming it upon demons, but Science fingered the true cause. Jesco was ten years old at the time, one of many children in the asylum crying out in nightmares of bodies strewn everywhere like paper dolls, streams of foam leaking from their lips and their eyes staring into whatever lay beyond.

  But there were no bodies now. The carriage bumped and turned through the silent streets, ever held in shadow from the abandoned, looming tenements. They could not be knocked down without freeing even more kolymbium, and still it would be sunken in the earth so that nothing could be built here again. The buildings stood as a graveyard, and once a year patrols of street officers swept through to peep in windows and make sure no one had broken in and perished. The fear of the dead zone was so extreme that they rarely found anyone save those intentionally missing, who had had the goal of ending their lives by dwelling in an emptied apartment until the poison overtook them.

  Sinclair was looking at him in concern, although Jesco’s remembrances of that childhood fear had made only a small divot in his forehead. “Are you well?” The eyes of the junior detective slid to Jesco’s gloved hands.

  Jesco shook his head to dismiss the worry. “I am not in thrall. It is simply strange to be in this haunted place that I’ve heard about since childhood.”

  Sinclair saw the truth of it and returned to gazing out the glass. “It was the worst of the worst even before the poisoning, a squalid place, no sanitation, no clean water, no insulation or ventilation in many of the buildings. I heard about how they slept here, three to a bed and two under a bed, rented for eight hours and then it was three more to the bed and two underneath. Then the same again in another eight hours. There could be fifteen people living in the smallest of rooms, forty in a larger one, and that house, that house there, it must have held hundreds.” He motioned and moved aside so that Jesco could look. They were passing a huge, centuries-old house with two floors. Hints of its former grandness remained in the stone quoins, the columns and pediment about the front door, and the oriel windows. When first built, it had been the home of a very rich person. Now it was a cracked and smudged disaster with shattered glass.

  “Only to see it in its heyday. The gardens had to have been splendid,” Sinclair said wistfully. There were no gardens now. Nudging up on either side were cheaply constructed tenements, each shrugging a deferential shoulder towards the once fine mansion. “This used to be the belle of the river. Called Wadalabie in olden days, before industry took root here.”

  Amused, Jesco said, “Are you a man of history, Sinclair?”

  “A man of insomnia. A book of history cures it.” He smiled as Jesco chuckled. “Many lords and ladies kept summer homes in Wadalabie. Did you know some of the earliest photographs were taken here? A collection called Place of Dreams showed it in all its finery: mansions and stables, and paths of white stone going down through fields of flowers to the river. A boat ran between Wadalabie and Rosendrie, where they could travel to shop. A short and pleasant trip on calm waters. But those lords and ladies died in time, and left their homes to their children, and some of them leased out those homes or sold them. And then the Industrial Revolution swept through Ainscote, and it transformed this place entirely. Wadalabie to Wattling, mansions to tenements, stables to textile factories, and no trace left of those paths or flowers.” He looked once more to Jesco’s hands. “Have you seen things like this, how time changes the world? You must.”

  “Yes.” It was why Jesco had to be so careful about what he touched.

  The carriage made another turn and slowed. They had arrived at their destination. Then Jesco was stepping out after the junior detective, and into Poisoners’ Lane where the alchemist had wrought his destruction in one of these very buildings.

  It was the grimmest place of all. Along either side of the narrow gray road were tall brick buildings, all of them coated in grime. They were eyeless, as the windows had been removed and sealed up with bricks to discourage anyone from going inside. The doors were sealed in the same way, making every building wholly faceless. Above, the sky seemed only to be a reflection of the road beneath in its gray flatness. No trees pierced the rooftops and no birds flew overhead. All that existed within this claustrophobic lane was itself. The rest of the world felt miles away. Even the river, as close as the far side of the buildings to Jesco’s right, made no sound.

  There was another police carriage parked in the road, and a voice hailed Sinclair from an alley. Jesco breathed shallowly to take less of the air in this place into himself. Over twenty thousand people had died here almos
t simultaneously. Should ever there be a place ripe for spooks, this would be it. Failing to quell his anxiety, he followed Sinclair to the alley. The patrolman Tokol was standing at the end of it, a newspaper rolled up in his fist. Despite being of the same age as Jesco, he still looked like more of an overgrown boy than a man. Greeting Sinclair warmly and ignoring Jesco, Tokol moved aside to let them pass.

  “And a good day to you, too,” Jesco said loudly, forgetting his resolve to take in as little air as possible while he was here. Embarrassed, Tokol grunted a hostile good day. Jesco did not have to inquire to know that Tokol accepted Church teachings that what he did was obscene, but that placed the boyish officer in a quandary. The police relied on seer skills to assist in solving crimes. He resolved the matter by pretending Jesco did not exist, which was why Jesco took a special delight in reminding the officer that he most assuredly did, had every right to be here, and that his word was not only admissible in court but preferred.

  The alley was piled with a tall heap of long beams on one side. Rags and bits of paper were trapped in the heap, and nails protruded from the rotting wood. The ground was carpeted in layers of trash, so trodden upon that it lay mostly flat, and it reeked of mold. Fresher trash was present in a few sheets of newspaper, which Tokol had discarded.

  More beams connected the buildings on either side, one so low that Jesco had to stoop to pass beneath it. The purpose of the beams was beyond his kenning. Jesco was no student of architecture, but from the way the buildings leaned, he guessed that they were holding them at bay so that they did not collapse upon each other.

  Also within the alley was a duo of his least favorite detectives in Steon Ravenhill and Laeric Scoth. Ravenhill had no animosity toward Jesco, but he had grown increasingly incompetent over the years. Now fifty, he was a man who drowned the horrors of his work in ale and smelled suspiciously even now at mid-morning. His wife had left him recently, and he had fallen apart further in her absence. Stubble-cheeked, slumping, and slovenly with stains on his lapel, his oily, graying hair hung in lusterless locks from too long without washing.