Steampunk Hearts

by Jordan Reece

  Everything was happening much too fast, yet every second of it lasted an eternity. They were going to plummet to the center of the world, Jesco thought, and then in another spin, he saw the dry riverbed. The carriage revolved and hit it with an enormous blast.

  They were upside-down, the wheelchair landing upon the ceiling. Then the carriage overturned one more time and skidded. Striking Jesco’s leg as it rolled past, the wheelchair hit the window and fell onto its side. Finally, everything went still.

  “Don’t move,” Scoth whispered. Jesco let his head slump to the side and closed his eyes to slits. The door was now above him, and attached to the carriage only by the bottom hinge. A triangular jag of purple light came down where the door sagged from the frame.

  Coming from high above them was the sound of voices. It was hard to make out most of the words at the distance, but one had a booming pitch that carried. They were discussing whether or not to climb down and look into the carriage. The prevailing opinion was to not attempt such an endeavor when night was dropping fast, and the slope so steep. “No one could have survived that!” exclaimed the loud-voiced one twice.

  Don’t come down, Jesco pleaded. Don’t come down.

  They talked up there for some time. And then, convinced that no one had survived the plunge, they rode away. The purple faded to black as Jesco listened for any sounds that someone was returning. All he heard was crickets. The machinery along the ceiling had gone quiet. Blood was dripping from his forehead. The wheelchair must have struck him in the head on the way down, though he did not remember it.

  Fumbling behind his head, Scoth made the struts over his shoulders release. He staggered to a crouching position beside the wheelchair. “I’ll see what’s going on,” he whispered, and slid the broken door aside. Hoisting himself up, he exited the carriage. It sounded like he was opening the lower compartment. Jesco looked up to starlight as Scoth thumped around. Then the carriage rocked. The detective had jumped down and landed heavily in the riverbed.

  There was a crack in the carriage along the side pressed to the rocky ground. A little water trickled in steadily and made a pool around the wheelchair. Footsteps went here and there for several minutes, Jesco curious but dazed.

  Scoth returned to the door above and rested a blazing lantern beside it. “Still got your senses?” he called in.

  “More or less,” Jesco said.

  “See if you can’t reach behind you. There should be a lever behind the seat. Flick it to the side and the shoulder bands will come off.” Jesco did as he was told and the struts retracted. Scoth said, “Good. Now, hold out your hand to mine, and with your left foot, kick it back twice and hard.”

  Jesco put his gloved hand in Scoth’s, and kicked. The leg band released and the lower half of his body slid to the bottom of the carriage. “All right,” Scoth said, letting go of him. “Lift out your wheelchair, and then we’ll get you out.”

  Within minutes, they were standing outside in the moonlight and Jesco was holding a kerchief from his belongings to his cut. His bag was at his feet. Scoth was moving about with a limp from the wheelchair bashing into his knees twice on the fall. The road was invisible above them.

  “Should we go back to Somentra?” Jesco asked. “We’re far closer to it than Cantercaster.”

  “Those men came from Somentra,” Scoth said. “We need to get as far away from it as we can.”

  They had passed a few towns between the two cities. In the morning, they could walk to the nearest one and rent a carriage ride back to Cantercaster. But it was going to be a difficult journey when they could not climb up this steep slope to the road to walk along it, and beyond the riverbed were woods.

  The trees were tall and looming, and their leaves chattered in the breeze. At a strange sound, Scoth slipped a jackknife from his pocket. Foliage rustled and a large shape emerged, coming to them with plodding steps.

  It was the autohorse. The poor contraption was a mess of hair and scales from the slashes of that rider, and exposed machinery where its tail had fallen off. Scoth put away his blade and cried out in a glad, raspy whisper, “Horse!”

  “How did it find us?” Jesco asked, equally happy to see the autohorse.

  “Same way my mother made that bird find me,” Scoth said. “I put in a lot of her old equipment. Good Horse, good Horse.”

  Horse stood there as Scoth made the shooter retract, and withdrew a hitch from the spot where the tail had been to attach the wheelchair. Leading the autohorse to a boulder in the dry bed, he had Jesco step onto it to mount. After passing up the bag, Scoth went to the chest flap to work with the destination cards.

  “What are you doing?” Jesco asked.

  “Making Horse take us straight to the station. Someone will spot that carriage down there tomorrow morning, send a crew to investigate and find no one inside. I won’t be hard to track down when they come looking for me at home, if they do, and you won’t be hard to track down either. We need a safe place to be.” He closed the flap, clambered up the boulder with a groan about his knees, and mounted the autohorse behind Jesco. At a kick, it walked obediently into the trees.

  Everything grew closely together in this wooded area. Many of the trees to fall over time had not struck the ground but ended up at a tilt against a neighbor or two, their foliage enmeshed. It was eerie to travel amongst them with only the light of the lantern. The trees looked like soldiers in a frozen march, with some helping wounded compatriots along.

  Leaves rasped against their legs and night creatures flickered in and out of the light. Owls hooted. Jesco’s head wound had stopped bleeding, but it ached. All of him ached from that crazed, whirling plunge down the hillside. Exhaustion made him sag into himself, and then an arm went around his waist to steady him and Scoth said, “All right?”

  Jesco could not get himself upright. He leaned back and said, “I’ll live.”

  “To someone’s regret, I would say. Next time, I’ll add a strut that binds the wheelchair to the wall.”

  “That’s kind of you, but could there not be a next time that we go over a cliff, Scoth?”

  Scoth rumbled with laughter. “It was my grandfather’s name. Laeric. Teachers at school would call me Larrie and I hated that. I’d get all puffed up at seven and eight and explain in indignation that it was Laeric, thank you very much. Even then, I was highly protective of my dignity. There was no dignity in being called Larrie.”

  He was asking Jesco to call him Laeric, but without saying it directly. “Add the strut, Laeric, and I hope that we never have to use it,” Jesco replied. “Those were quite some additions you made to your autohorse and carriage.”

  “I like to fiddle with things.”

  “That was far more than fiddling.”

  “It’s just fiddling to me, to take my mind away from the ugliness. And now that those riders showed me the weak spots, I’ve got plenty more fiddling to do.”

  “Torrus Kodolli can never be accused of being a shrinking violet.”

  As the horse steered around a solid wall of leaves dropping down from shaggy trees, Scoth said, “That was the most brazen thing I’ve ever seen, if he’s responsible.”

  “How could he not be?”

  “Matter of proof. Did he order his bodyguards to hire up some street-rassel to run us off? Or did his bodyguards do it of their own accord? What about that lawyer? He must facilitate a lot of Kodolli’s business affairs and Kodolli isn’t an honest man, so I doubt the lawyer is either. He’s just as thick in this as his client.”

  Something was wrong with the autohorse. When they came to a field and Scoth kicked it to run, metal clacked brokenly within the enormous belly. For a moment it faltered, and then it broke into a weary trot. That was as fast as it could go. It was better than nothing, Jesco told himself as he jounced bareback upon Horse. If not for the autohorse, he and Scoth would be on foot with their injuries.

  A long time passed before the autohorse reached the road. Still the mechanical creature kept to its slow
trot. There was no traffic but that of the moon in the heavens above, gliding meditatively across the sky.

  They passed a quiet town divided in half by the road through it. The only people around were drunkards staggering out of inns and saloons, and carriages-for-hire offering to take them home. More were parked outside an opium den. Since the autohorse was still functional despite its damage, Scoth did not stop to rent another ride.

  Jesco dozed a little, and roused to Scoth’s voice some time later. “The attack wasn’t Kodolli’s style.”

  “It wasn’t?” Jesco asked sleepily.

  “Unless age is making him lose his faculties. The captain, Ravenhill, no one at the station knew where I was going today. But Kodolli didn’t know that. If he had killed us, he would have to assume that the police would come investigating. The eye of the law would be drawn to him, detectives hunting around for clues and bringing a fresh seer to poke at his things. And what did he give us to incriminate himself? He never copped to knowing Hasten Jibb; he admitted to meeting Tallo Quay but said that he sent him away. Quay’s disappeared and can’t contradict that statement. He took away the photograph and drawing, so you can’t get anything from them. You clearly weren’t ever in a thrall from touching the table barehanded. This attack was an impulse act, rash, and a clumsy one. Torrus Kodolli ignores what he doesn’t like until the fines get too high. Then he spits fire but eventually acquiesces. He would just ignore this investigation until someone really starts breathing down his neck.”

  Jesco sighed. “This case is going to go cold, but not for lack of trying on our part.”

  “It’s too early to call it cold. Someone in that conference room, or connected to it in that office, was greatly alarmed by the two of us being there. If they had nothing to do with Jibb’s murder or Quay’s disappearance, then why would they care to silence us?”

  “The packages,” Jesco yawned.

  “Yes, the packages that Jibb had! He collected those after leaving the old woman’s house, I presume. We have to look at every inch of that ride home. Someone gave him packages to deliver, someone who didn’t want to use a proper courier service. Bet they paid him under the table to do it. Then he fell off his bicycle and spilled them . . . did one get lost in that grass? Did he go back that night to tell the person that one package, or more than one, was lost or smashed? Or did he deliver what he had and a recipient killed him? All I want to know right now is who did he pass on that ride?”

  “Torrus Kodolli doesn’t have a house in Melekei, and he likely wasn’t anywhere near the city at the time. Does his son live there?”

  “The son does some of the traveling with his father, from what I gleaned in my research, and stays in one of two homes when he isn’t traveling. Neither is in Melekei: the closer of the two is fifteen, twenty miles away. He and his wife own a third home in the north where she stays. They don’t have much to do with one another. I don’t know anything about the lawyer.”

  Jesco slept, dimly aware the entire time that he was upon an autohorse instead of tucked into bed. Horse trotted on and on, slowing to a walk on occasion and responding only with great reluctance to kicks. Eventually it could not trot any further and plodded. Jesco dreamed that the autohorse was coming upon a deep, dark pit that would send them plummeting down into the arms of demons. He was twitching from fear and talking in his sleep, and a voice said, “No demons, Jesco, just a road through the fields under a starry sky.”

  It was morning when they arrived at the station. Heads turned when they came in, Scoth at a hobble and Jesco with dried blood on his face and shirt. Then they were seated and everyone was bustling about to get food and water and a first aid kit. The cut on Jesco’s forehead was not deep, so he did not require a doctor, and Scoth’s knees were badly bruised but that was all.

  Scoth told the story and a patrolman was sent out to move the damaged autohorse to the stables. Spurred to interest at last in this case, the captain cast about for somewhere to stow them for the time being. A few of the patrolmen drifted away at once, not wishing to house Jesco, and Lady Ericho declined with a gracious apology since she was currently hosting relatives. Ravenhill burped and sank into a chair with a stupid expression. Sinclair’s wife had just had a baby, but they could stay with him if they didn’t mind a night broken by bawling. Then Patrolman Tokol exclaimed, “Well, not me!” when the captain turned to him, and Tammie plunked her book of pieces down with a disgusted look to Tokol.

  “If the station wants to spot me some money for rent, my roommate just moved out of her wing and I haven’t found a new person to move in,” she said. “I’m over at the Byway and who’d look for them there? They can hide with me until a handle’s gotten on this situation. It’s only got one bed, though one of you two can sleep on the sofa.”

  That decided it. A nondescript carriage was hired to ferry them and the wheelchair to her home. Scoth had been awake all night and fell asleep as soon as the carriage got underway. The patrolmen were divided into three squads, one to Scoth’s home and one to the asylum to pick up essentials, and a third following along after Jesco and Scoth to make sure no one made another attempt on their lives.

  Tammie rode with them and watched out the windows, but they arrived at her place unmolested. It was an old, towering box of a house but not without charm, wisteria hanging from an archway to the front garden. It looked exactly like the asylum with flowers running riot all through it, and Jesco felt immediately at home.

  “That’s yours there,” Tammie said as they got out, Scoth yawning. “That one to the left. Looks two stories but it’s not, just high ceilings. I’m here at the right, and there in the middle is a shared kitchen. I’m not going to be cooking for you or cleaning up your dishes, just so we’re clear from the start. I wasn’t clear enough with Nattia, it appears, and I got right sick of the princess complaining that there were no clean spoons when she was the reason they weren’t clean, or that the dinner I’d made was only big enough for one. Her parents came to stay once for a week and it was true of all three of them: content to sit around and do nothing while someone else works to get them through the day.”

  The carriage driver was paid and duly went away, as did the carriage of patrolmen now that they had arrived safely. Tammie searched through her satchel for the key and let them into the kitchen. Herbs grew in pots along the counters, long overdue for pruning, but otherwise it was tidy.

  In the left wing, Scoth crashed down onto the sofa and promptly returned to sleep. Tammie tiptoed out and Jesco settled into an armchair. He wanted to make up the bed and sleep, but he had not brought his bedding along to Somentra. Having covered the back of the chair with his jacket, he slumped there and faded into unconsciousness.

  Neither woke until the patrolmen arrived at the same time with their belongings. By then it was well into the afternoon, and Jesco thought it wise to keep awake until night to return his schedule to normal. He made up the bed and pushed himself away from it to bathe.

  The captain had given Tammie enough money to cover the rent and the food for a week, and she’d gone shopping. Neither Jesco nor Scoth were good at conversation from their fatigue, but she was well equipped to carry a chat for all three of them and did as they made a meal and ate it together at the table. A liberal amount of ale was poured in their glasses both during and after the meal, Tammie of the opinion that both of them needed it. Then she retired to her wing and they to theirs.

  “Is the sofa comfortable to sleep on?” Jesco asked.

  “It’ll do,” Scoth said indifferently.

  “We can trade off on the bed if we’re here for a while, change the sheets-”

  “More trouble than it’s worth.” He sank into the cushions and tipped sideways onto the pillow. “I’m not drunk. It just looks that way.”

  Jesco laughed. He wasn’t drunk either, but warmth and ease was pervading every limb of his body. “So to Melekei then.”

  “It’ll just be me turning endless pages in the Hall of Records. Why don’t you sta
y here for the day and let your head heal up?”

  “All right. But I don’t want to be . . .”

  “Be what?”

  “Pushed off to the side in this case.”

  “You’re not. This is just a part of it that you can’t do, Jesco, and I can. So I will, and I’ll come back here to tell you what I learned. I’ll stop at Ragano & Wemill as well and get a list of all Jibb’s jobs while he worked there. Jibb’s jobs.” He paused and then snickered at how it sounded. “I’m not drunk. I swear it.”

  Jesco took off his gloves. He didn’t mind a day of rest, yet he was reluctant to miss anything. But he could not deny that there was little he could do at a Hall of Records.

  Scoth was watching him, and something about the stoic detective looked as disarmed as he had with the sunner. “What?” Jesco asked.

  “You’ve got nice eyes. I noticed that years ago, even when I was about ready to punch you in one of them.”

  “Flirtation is not your gift.”

  “It wasn’t a flirtation. You just have nice eyes.”

  It had been a flirtation, and both of them knew it. “Well then, I’ve always liked your hair. Even though you must spend a half hour on it every morning getting it to look perfect. I’m not flirting either.”

  “I’ve gotten it down to fifteen minutes, and it’s not a matter of vanity. Left to its own devices, my hair looks like a flock of birds call it their nest. There were a few times in my university days that I just shaved it off entirely.” Scoth tried to prop himself up, but only sank deeper into the pillows. “It wasn’t right what you said.”

  “Which was?”

  “That the only men to have you would be prosties. I’ve been thinking on that for days now.”

  “It makes things very complicated.”

  “Complicated isn’t impossible. You act like you’re damaged goods, but what you have isn’t real damage. Not like the people I’ve caught, twisted minds, blood on their hands, no shame about what they’ve done, and no concept that they should be ashamed. That’s damage to me.”