Steampunk Hearts

by Jordan Reece

  It was almost evening when the phonograph came to the last page of the book. Closing it, the fingers retracted and the machine turned off. Jesco could take no more curiosity about the noise from upstairs, and some strength had come back to him. He dressed himself and stood up, wobbled yet held, and started for the door. It helped to hold on to the furniture. Halfway up the stairs he felt like he might fall, so he sat down heavily and rested his gloved hand upon a bar of the railing. The clattering stopped and Scoth appeared at the landing. Embarrassed, Jesco said, “I’ll make it.”

  “Could have just called for help.” Scoth came down, wrapped his hands under Jesco’s armpits, and pulled him up step by step. Dragged into a room, Jesco was lifted to a chair.

  It was a workshop filled with tables, whirly-gigs both whole and disemboweled all over them. There were tools for wood and metal along the walls, strips of horsehair in multiple colors hanging from a bar, and clusters of jars filled with nails and screws and washers on a bench. What slim light the sky was offering came down through giant skylights in the ceiling, where they caught upon strings of crystal and reflected over everything. Scoth went to a corner of the shop that was further lit by lanterns and bent down to pick up screws that had been dumped all over the floor.

  “What do you do in here?” Jesco asked.

  “Make a huge mess most of the time,” Scoth said as he dropped a screw in a jar. “It was my mother’s, a lot of it. She had a gift.”

  “What did she do?”

  “Made things. She couldn’t see a machine without wanting to improve it.” Looking to a pale blue, mechanical bird hanging from the ceiling, its beak open in a silent cry, he said, “That was hers. I hated that thing. She would put destination cards in its chest and send it flying around to find me with reminders about my chores. When I kept coming home late from school, she sent it downriver where I was larking about and had it yell at me. She’d coded her scolding to the map. I ran home real quick, my friends laughing their fool heads off.”

  “She must have been young when she passed.”

  “She was, and so was my father. They did almost everything together, so it was fitting that they just about died together, too. She had a weak heart, and he couldn’t keep going without her.”

  “Did you never want to return to Korval to work there?”

  “No. Money buys justice in little towns. It does that everywhere, but in some places, it’s much more blatant. And when money isn’t involved, well, then it just depends on the victim how much interest is going to be shown.”

  “Was that what happened to your brother? Or was it a cousin?”

  Scoth stopped picking up screws to give him a puzzled look. “No brothers or cousins to speak of. Why would you think that?”

  “I’m sorry. It was station gossip that you lost a brother or cousin.”

  Annoyed, Scoth returned to his clean-up job. “It was Ravenhill running at the mouth over his cups, and as usual, he got it wrong.”

  Thinking of Ravenhill’s insistence that a pickpocket had dragged Hasten Jibb’s body to Poisoners’ Lane, and wishing fervently that he had never brought up the gossip, Jesco said, “He’s not doing well lately, is he? He’s worked too many bad cases.”

  “Nothing to do with his cases, or not much,” Scoth replied. “They don’t walk with him. Ravenhill’s lazy, they warned me when I got assigned to him. He’ll sew up a case with any thread at hand. Black thread, white thread, good thread, bad thread, he’ll use anything and figure it’s done. He was better than that once. But now . . . now he’s just wanting to get back to the card tables and a glass of gin, some fun with a prostie girl.”

  “Is that why his wife left him?”

  “His wife is a good woman. She knows about the prosties; she has a prostie man at a place that she visits herself. You play with your body but you leave your heart at home, that’s always been their understanding about it. And you patronize a quality establishment where you won’t be trotting home an infection on your personals. She kept up her end of it and he didn’t. Twice he gave her infections of different kinds, and there isn’t going to be a third time. She won’t be back. And all he thinks is that she’s the one being unreasonable.” Scoth put the last of the screws in the jar and set it on the workbench. He eyed Jesco warily. “Did you already know all that from your thrall on me?”

  “All I saw was you going into The Seven Temptations.”

  “Honest?”

  “Honest. And it was nothing new to me. I’ve seen you there twice before.”

  Astounded, Scoth said, “I never saw you there. Why didn’t you come over and say something?”

  “We’ve admitted to being pricks. That should answer your question.”

  Scoth ran his hand through his hair and made it even messier. “You could touch the things in that room and peep on myself and my whole family if it pleased you.”

  “I could, but I’d rather not be in a wheelchair for weeks.”

  “You could see my deepest, darkest secrets laid out in front of your eyes, experiencing them just like you were me. I thought at first that Kyrad didn’t know how much privacy she was giving up when she offered her ring, but she knew damn well. She knew and did it anyway to clear herself.”

  “I sincerely doubt that your deepest, darkest secrets could be anywhere near as shocking as the things I have seen in my life.”

  Turning off the lanterns one by one, Scoth said, “What do you do with all of that private information? Those are people’s souls laid bare before you.”

  “All of it comes at a great cost to me. I don’t watch for entertainment, and I try to steer away from memories that aren’t relevant. And for what I do see anyway . . . I keep it to myself, the most private things. Because they are usually memories of pain, and I don’t want to tell anyone. I’m quite regularly sorry that I know them myself.”

  They went downstairs, Jesco’s arm over Scoth’s shoulders, and made it to the spare bedroom without disaster. “Should we head for Ipsin?” he asked as Scoth settled him back in bed.

  “Should but can’t for another two or three days. The only place I’ll be going tomorrow is to the market and on foot, and maybe the station the day after that to write a report of what we’ve learned. I’ve been to Ipsin once before and it’ll be a damn mudslide at the moment. You’re stuck here, sorry to say.” He removed the book from the phonograph and returned it to its shelf. Then he scanned the shelves for another one.

  “Would it be all right if I came upstairs to watch tomorrow?” Jesco blurted.

  “Sure. Wear your gloves and you can take apart the pile of clickers if you like. I want those gears inside.” He took another book from the shelf and brought it to the phonograph, though he didn’t turn it on to read.

  “What are you making with them?” Jesco asked.

  “A shooter, or I’m trying. Attaches to the arm, make a fist for the ignition, blasts out a projectile. Like a tiny cannon. So far I’ve just succeeded in shooting myself in the shoulder, so I can’t say that I’ll be wearing it out in the field any time soon.”

  Jesco laughed and Scoth actually smiled. It was a small smile, a flash of white teeth and a sarcastic cant to his eyebrows at the shoddy workings of his invention, but it was the most that Jesco had ever seen from him. Then he went to get dinner, and brought it in upon two plates for both of them to eat together.

  The next morning, Jesco got upstairs without trouble, and stripped a collection of old clicker cameras for the gears. It was not easy to do in gloves but still happy work. Afterwards, Scoth dressed his arm in a black holder with a cylinder that stretched down his forearm, and a strap that extended around his palm. He made a fist and rounds of pellets flew out to score dents into the wall. Jesco’s cheer was cut off by a yelp, Scoth ripping the shooter from his arm. The cylinder had grown very hot with each successive round and was scorching him.

  There was little evidence of the thrall by the next day, Jesco tired but getting about without assistance. Scoth went to
the station and returned in the evening with a furious expression. “Look at this!” he snapped, throwing down a newspaper in front of Jesco, who was sitting at the kitchen table to eat.

  “I can’t,” Jesco said, and Scoth snatched it away.

  “Owner of Naphates Mines is under investigation of murder,” he growled. “It was published in the Rosendrie South Press just this morning.”

  Shocked, Jesco said, “But she isn’t under investigation! I cleared her. Who was the source for the article?”

  “Doesn’t name the person and it’s a right piece of yellow journalism. It says that investigators went to the home of Kyrad Naphates to question her about the brutal murder of Hasten Jibb. It insinuates that he was one of her prostie boys.”

  “He damn well wasn’t! That poor fellow couldn’t have faked it if he had tried. What else does it say?”

  “It goes on at length about how she’s aiming for that position in Parliament and how this is going to hurt her chances. They won’t want someone accused of criminal activity, someone involved in an open investigation. It even says a seer was brought to her home! But not that you found her innocent. And here . . . here it says that the detectives on the case refused to comment. How was I supposed to comment when no journalist ever approached to ask me a thing?”

  Jesco had lost his appetite. Pushing his plate aside, he said, “The source had to have been one of the escorts, but why?”

  “Or a servant. She has plenty of both. Someone at that house spoke to this journalist who wrote it, Noran Gordano. He made sure to note that Parliament will be taking their vote on the liaison position next week. Do they want a criminal in their midst?” In disgust, Scoth tossed the paper into the rubbish bin.

  “I wonder if the servant or escort approached the journalist and sold the story,” Jesco said. “Netted himself or herself a pretty penny and likely trounced Kyrad’s chances in the process.”

  “Do you need to return to the asylum for anything, or can you go to Ipsin with me tomorrow?” Scoth asked. “I need to track down this Tallo Quay!”

  Jesco paused to think of anything he could need from the asylum. “No, I’ve got my belongings with me, and I’ve already sent a portion of my pay to Isena for the month. I can go to Ipsin tomorrow.”

  “Who is that? Isena?”

  “My older sister. She was widowed a few years ago. I send her money.”

  “Decent of you.”

  “She’s all the family I have, she and her children. The rest of them believe I’m a demon’s child.”

  Grumpily, Scoth sat down with his own plate of food. “I’ll take you back after Ipsin. Good to get rid of you. I eat far too regularly when you’re around.”

  “How you suffer.”

  “And Tammie’s back from Hooler. She said to give you a kiss, but I won’t.”

  “How I suffer. Saving them all for Collier? Why don’t you have a man of your own?”

  “I did. He said I was married to the job and quit me. Can’t hold that against him. Why don’t you have a man?”

  Jesco held up his hands. “Who would have me but a prostie? Who wants to make a partner of a man who has to live in an asylum, who can’t touch anything but flesh without gloves, who can’t even go out to eat or drink without complications?”

  Scoth neither agreed nor disagreed, and changed the subject. “They’re pulling back on the Shy Sprinkler case. Nothing’s been found. The captain is taking heat about the unsolved necktie killings and wants me to focus more on those. I’m only going to finagle a few more days on Jibb before he starts coming down harder. I put him off with Ravenhill, who will be continuing that investigation for now.”

  “I didn’t get called in for that case. Was a seer not needed?”

  “No, those killings don’t call for a seer. I know damn well who did it but we just can’t locate him. We didn’t call you in for the Tesoola Park case either.”

  “What’s that one?”

  “Mother and little daughter taking a walk some time back, middle of the day, and someone or more than one someone shot them both in the back with arrows. And then pulled the arrows out and strolled away. They were killed almost instantly. No motive, no witnesses, no leads, no evidence, nothing. Just two dead bodies on the ground side by side, the mom holding the girl’s arm. That one keeps me up a lot of nights. It was like game sport for someone, but instead of hunting deer in the forest, he went to the park and hunted people.”

  “And he never did it again?”

  “Or did it somewhere else very far away. I don’t know. The hardest cases are the ones with no connections between the people who did it and the people they did it to. But Jibb now, I don’t think that’s the kind of case this is. There’s a connection somewhere; we just haven’t found it.”

  Early the next morning, they left. Like Rosendrie, Ipsin was south of Cantercaster. The puddles from the storm were soaking into the earth; the sky was blue and the world washed clean and bright. The streets were busy, repairmen replacing windows that had broken and city workers chopping fallen trees and ferrying them away. The autohorse stopped once and sharply, Jesco and Scoth almost unseated inside. A little boy chasing after a ball had run heedlessly into the road. His father bellowed from the porch of a house and sprinted to retrieve him. Knocking on the carriage door once he had his son in arms, the man called, “Sorry, gentlemen!” and retreated to the sidewalk.

  Otherwise, the road to Ipsin was uneventful. The autohorse drew them on to the Hall of Records, where Scoth went inside to see if he could get any information about Tallo Quay. He came out with an address and went to the autohorse to program it in before returning to the carriage. As they pulled away, Jesco said, “Is his home close by?”

  “They only had an approximate address for a man named Michum Quay, his wife Shadra, and unnamed children close to majority age. It was old information. But Tallo must be related in some way to them. Quay isn’t a common surname and these are the only ones in the area.”

  “An approximate address?”

  “Turn left at The Donkey Inn, past the four patches of trees, down the road to Shackton, and then five-skip on the left. I couldn’t program that last part into a destination card since I have no idea what it means, and neither did the clerk who gave it to me. The horse will only take us to the inn, and from there on, I’ll have to drive it manually.”

  In due time, the carriage was slowing for the inn. Jesco stayed inside as Scoth hoisted himself up to the seat and called for Horse to go on. They rode past the patches of trees and turned for a narrow dirt road that cut down a sharp slope. The ground was spotted with shadows from the trees, which rose up like dappled white poles far overhead and only bore branches and leaves at the very top.

  Shackton was a shantytown. Every piece of rusted sheet metal and plank of splintered wood in all of Ainscote seemed to have rolled down this slope and gathered precariously into homes at the bottom. All of them were propping each other up and a few had collapsed from the effort. Struts held up the ones built upon the slope itself. Clothing and dead fowl hung from lines between the trees, and crude barrel fences had been erected to outline yards. There were no addresses or street names, and the dirt lanes were very narrow.

  Eyes turned to the autohorse and carriage. The only traffic here was on foot. Jesco could hear Scoth’s muffled voice asking for directions to the Quay home. He was soundly ignored until he produced a coin. Then a young girl led them on, running ahead through the maze of tight alleys and beckoning to the autohorse. She stopped before a shanty with rusted red sides and a barrel fence missing many of its barrels. Scoth gave her the coin, the girl slipping it into her pocket and running away.

  The detective got down as Jesco opened the door of the carriage. Raised voices were ringing out from the shanty, a man and woman yelling at one another in anger. Something crashed and their shouts only increased in volume and temper. Alarmed, Scoth said, “It might be better if you stayed put.”

  Jesco closed the door and retook
his seat as Scoth knocked and went inside. Uncomfortable minutes passed in the carriage with dirty faces pressing up against the windows to look in. A boy of fifteen or sixteen shouted, “Are you a lord? Are you a lord, sir?” His jaws were crenellated parapets, each merlon of a tooth separated by a gap so large that the tip of his tongue could protrude through. Jesco shook his head repeatedly to the question, but there was a dull look to the boy’s eyes and he continued to ask. Finally, other people knocked him away so that they could look in. Some were obviously scanning around for anything to steal, and the humble insides of the carriage disappointed them.

  Scoth came out of the residence, his trench coat dripping. The people about the carriage faded away at a fast clip. Hoisting himself up to the seat, Scoth pushed the autohorse forward. He was trying to find a place to turn around, but the alleys were so tiny that that was not possible. At last he shouted to another child, producing a coin for a route out of Shackton, and they were duly led back to the main road. Scoth stopped there to fiddle with the autohorse, and let himself into the carriage. The horse drew them on alone.

  “Offered you a drink, did they?” Jesco asked. The splash on the trench coat was one of alcohol.

  “Roaring drunk, Michum Quay, and his lady friend who is not his wife,” Scoth said in aggravation. “Drunk and screaming their heads off about nonsense as they threw glasses at each other. I couldn’t understand half of what they said. But I got it out of him that he hasn’t seen his son Tallo in years.”

  “How many years?”

  “He was incapable of specifics. Tallo went to work for a brothel, he said with disgust. That had to be the escort agency. His father wanted nothing to do with him after that. But he knew that his son was living in town with a woman some time later.”