Steampunk Tales, Volume 1

by Ren Cummins

  He wasn’t sure how long the paralysis would last, but judging by Molla’s reaction, he was probably going to be like this for a while. Thankfully, he was frozen in such a way that he could both see – and be seen – the door swing open at the far end of the landing. Rom and Ian stepped from the doorway, turned and instantly saw Cousins and Kari laid out on the floor.

  Ian held up a hand for caution, and they both stood stock-still to analyze the situation. The man placed a calming hand on Rom’s shoulder – it was clear she wanted to instantly run to Kari’s side – and seemed to silently assure her that her friend was well. He reached into his jacket and drew out a thin piece of paper, no larger than the palm of his hand – there was some sort of design on one side, like a playing card. He waved it once in the air and then flicked the card quickly from him. It sailed for five or six feet and then stopped, as if striking an invisible something before fading into a small breath of smoke. He then turned to Rom and nodded. To Cousins, he said, “They cannot now hear us. We have a few moments to prepare.”

  They walked quickly to Kari, and Ian held his hand above her, palm towards the ground. “She is only asleep. You may wake her, but gently.” While Rom knelt beside her and nudged her gently by the shoulder, Ian moved on to Cousins.

  He pulled out another piece of paper from his inner pocket and placed it against Cousin’s forehead. From this side of the paper, he could see the images, but his eyes – held as they were by the spell – could not focus clearly enough to see what they were. There was a faint spark and the card dissolved, sending warmth across his skin, which was followed by a dull ache in his bones and muscles – however, the paralysis vanished.

  He stood unsteadily, teeth gritted. “Please tell me we’re going to stop them,” he growled.

  Ian nodded. “Fetch your glasses.”

  Favo checked the color on the amulet. It was growing dark; they probably only had another 5 or ten minutes before they’d be setting off whatever alarms the old woman had on this place. He’d gone through the usual hiding spots in the shop’s back office, but he still couldn’t find it. It’s the problem with stealing from magicians, he thought, they always have the best hiding places. He ran a hand across his unshaven jaw. This was taking too long.

  Molla appeared in the doorway. “It was a girl,” she said. “I put her back to sleep.”

  He arched an eyebrow.

  “Just to sleep,” she said. “I didn’t hurt her.”

  He nodded, satisfied. He didn’t care what his reputation was; a person never had to look their reputation in the face when they slept at night. He had struggled for years with the delicate balancing act required to keep his business affairs clean, free from the sort of thing that a simple apology or a bag of economical reparations couldn’t resolve. Molla was a good person to have around during a job, but she clearly had a substantially different set of priorities.

  “I heard a boy’s voice,” he commented, pulling two additional drawers out and looking quickly through them.

  Molla chuckled low in her throat. “Cousins tried to get a shot off; I left him stunned in the hallway.”

  Favo grimaced. Cousins was starting to become a problem. As it was, the boy’s influence in the town was growing substantially, but the biggest problem was that Favo actually liked the boy; made Favo think of himself, had he made different choices.

  “Still nothing,” Molla said more than asked. Favo shook his head no, and kept looking in the cabinets.

  Molla slammed one of the drawers closed with an exasperated sigh. “I still say we bring the shop girl or the two brats down here and encourage one of them to tell us.”

  “I told you, she’s probably more than just a simple shop girl,” he said. “She’s the old woman’s apprentice, after all.” Molla’s impatience was rubbing off on him, and he pointed a thumb towards the opposite wall. “And the children are options, but not yet. You want to be helpful, go check that side.”

  Before she had a chance to argue, he added, “Three minutes, we’re out. Make them count.”

  She adjusted the mask across her face and nodded. She couldn’t really argue with him, he was always right about these jobs. At any rate, she’d be glad to wrap this up and get home. This mask was hot and making her sweat.

  When she moved past Favo, a slight breeze followed her and brushed against him. He smiled at the scent. It reminded him of the purple blossoms that arrived each summer after the late spring rains. That made him think of his youth in the fields, tending to the crops and helping them get every last drop of water they needed. The summers were hot. Days of standing beneath the sun, its rays pounding down on them like… he shook his head.

  He was standing in front of the first row again – but hadn’t he already checked that row? And why was he thinking about his childhood? Work to be done, no time for daydreaming. It was a good childhood, he mused, full of daydreams. Warm, lazy days in the grass, cool evening breezes blowing the… he shook his head again. Damn it. What was happening? He was back at the first row again. What was he looking for, he wondered? Why was he - - -

  He gritted his teeth and slapped the back of his glove. “Purgios!” he called out.

  He grabbed Molla by the arm, where she was flicking her hands in the air as if chasing fireflies. She snapped back to attention. “What? What’s going on?” she demanded.

  Pointing to the doorway, he turned her to face it. “Give us a wall, I need a second.”

  She looked up to see a façade splintering in the air to reveal a tall, thin man and two children. But Molla was no novice. She quickly threw down a pebble from a concealed pocket into the doorway, which sprang up into a thick rock wall that blocked the two of them in and kept the others out. “Done!” she called to Favo.

  He looked at her shoulder and brushed away a small spot of dust. “They hit you with a muddler, you must have dragged it in here with me. We have to go – they found us.” He was pulling out a small pouch from his belt, and emptying a handful of sand into his palm. Only enough for one of these cabinets, he measured, frowning. He flipped a coin in his mind and decided on the opposite result, just to counter the potentially bad luck of instinct. Blowing the sand onto the cabinet, he took three steps backwards and ran into the cabinet at full speed. The cabinet vanished with a loud popping sound, knocking him backwards across the room.

  “If it’s still in this room somewhere, then they deserve to keep it,” he said.

  She shrugged, pulling a small metal tube from another pocket. “We’d better go, or they might deserve to keep us, too.”

  He looked around the four walls, the ceiling, the floor. They were out of time, and out of options. He pointed to the floor. “Fancy a swim?”

  Her frown, visible below the mask, was filled with disgust. “You’re going to have to clean me off when we’re done with this,” she said.

  He chuckled as she unwound the wax seal on one end of the tube and pointed the compressed steam cannon towards a spot on the floor, halfway between them both. “Perhaps we should start escaping from all our little adventures through the sewers,” he grinned.

  She pulled the protective goggles over the eye holes in the mask. “Don’t push it,” she growled, holding her breath.

  “Was that the woman that knocked you out?” Ian asked Cousins, after the stone wall sprung up in front of them.

  Cousins nodded. “I think it’s Molla,” he explained. “She’s one of the only women he works with. Hard to tell with that mask, but I’m pretty sure it’s her, by the voice.”

  “Very well,” Ian answered. “Rom, I’m going to need you to kick this stone wall in,” he said. “Do you think you can do that for me?”

  Rom looked at him like he had just asked her if she were made of cheese. “You tell me – all I know is that I can jump far and kill monsters.”

  “Kill monsters?” Cousins asked.

  “Later,” Ian interrupted. “Rom, quickly – it’s just like jumping, only you’re going to have to jump two directi
ons at once – towards the rock and immediately against it; and you have to jump harder than you’ve ever jumped.”

  She nodded, taking the queue from the intensity in his explanation. Figuring her right foot was the stronger of the two, she took a step backwards and kicked off with that foot, slamming both feet at once into the center of the stone. Rather than bracing herself like she did when landing on the street, she kicked out fiercely. Surprisingly, the entire wall imploded into a puff of smoke, seemingly compressing into a tiny pebble. Without the rock as an opposing object, Rom flew on ahead and through the doorway, crashing into a stack of boxes within the office.

  Ian and Cousins looked into the room, but quickly realized that Rom was the only other occupant – and a gaping hole in the center of the room made it clear where the two thieves had gone.

  At that moment, Briseida and Kari appeared behind them. Ian quickly brought them up to speed.

  Rom pointed down at the hole in the floor. “Should we go after them?” she asked, holding her nose.

  Ian shook his head. “They will likely leave a path of traps behind them; by the time we made our careful way through them, they would be long since vanished.”

  Cousins agreed. “He’s got a lot of skill, that one. Not the kind of fellow I’d want to tangle with down in a dark tunnel.”

  Briseida examined the hole. Whatever they had used to get through the stone, it had burst a solid hole through ten inches of reinforced stone, plus an inch thick of iron plating.

  “I’ve never seen arts like this,” she commented, “It was strong enough to carve this hole through the entire floor and burst out the underside.”

  Ian frowned. “I cannot sense the echoes of the magic they used.” Turning to Cousins, he asked, “You are familiar with this man, Favo, yes? What forms of magic does he use?”

  Cousins shrugged. “Magic isn’t truly my strong hand,” he admitted. “That’s the details what interest you and your sort,” he winked at Kari. “I do know he does a good deal of under-the-table business with the crafting guilds, so I’d wager his talents are manufactured, rather than learned.”

  Kari was looking down at the hole and missed the gesture. Running her fingers along the lip of the opening, she lifted them to her nose. “That’s condensation,” she said. “And it’s pretty warm. I don’t think they used magic; I think they used some kind of compressed steam.”

  Skeptical, Cousins asked, “Are you sure? I’ve never seen some damage like that caused by air.”

  “Steam isn’t just air,” she chided. “It’s very hot water – and, directed appropriately, it can move with great speed.”

  “She would know,” Rom teased. “She knows everything about that.”

  Kari blushed. “Well, not everything: I don’t know how they got steam to do that. But I’m pretty sure they used steam here, somehow.” She looked more closely into the opening, and scrunched up her nose. “Eew. Stinky. Oh, and I think they cracked one of the distribution pipes down there, I can hear it hissing.” Sitting back up, she looked at Briseida and Ian. “We’re going to have to patch that up or it could break. And that would be bad.”

  Ian slid off his jacket and knelt beside Kari by the hole. “Show me what needs to be done, and I will do what I can.”

  A few minutes later, following Kari’s beaming assurance that the pipes were “shiny like new,” Briseida pulled a small rock from one of the remaining shelves’ many drawers. Scraping it first on the edge of the floor, she dropped it into the opening. It hung there, as if suspended on an invisible thread, and then expanded rapidly to fill the gap. “I will speak with one of the engineers tomorrow and ask them to flush out any remaining traps left by the thieves and to put a more permanent seal on our foundation. But for now, it is time to return to bed,” she said conclusively. She looked at Ian and said nothing more, but he nodded.

  The children were led back upstairs in spite of their protests and eventually managed to fall asleep, as the rush of adrenaline gradually left their systems.

  On the other side of the building, Briseida and Ian met briefly with Goya to review the night’s excitement.

  “Did they find the stone?” she asked them.

  Briseida shook her head. “They did manage to take a good deal of herbs and minor talens,” she said, “but they were looking in the office.”

  Goya smiled. “You were right to conceal it as you did, apprentice. Perhaps an old woman like myself is far too linear to think as cleverly as the younger ones do.”

  Ian arched an eyebrow. “Does the girl even know she carries it?”

  The young woman shook her head slightly. “She and Cousins both believe they saw me take the stone back and put it away in another room. It will be safer for now, where it is.”

  “Clever, indeed,” Ian said, clearly impressed. “A minor suggestion, but simple enough to be overlooked by the thieves if they had tried to discern it through the children’s minds.”

  “Precisely.”

  Goya’s smile faded: back to the business at hand. “Ian, would you mind locating this Favo lad for us? He is employing a variety of magical items, including the gem he used to attempt to pass my wards, which are of a both rare and inestimably old craft. I would be surprised to find he had constructed them on his own.”

  “You suspect he is working with someone else?”

  “He has an entire organization, but I’ve only seen him operate in the field with his assistant, a woman who calls herself Molla.” She looked meaningfully towards Briseida as she said this.

  Her apprentice lowered her head in a slow and remorseful nod. “So you believe it is her, after all? That she is not dead?” Briseida wrung her hands anxiously, twisting an elegant ring she wore on one hand.

  “I believe she has a strong will, and it would take more than death or exile to be rid of her. We are fortunate she did not see you, or this evening might have gone in another direction.” To Ian, Goya continued. “His associates are not our greatest concern, my old friend. There is only one person for whom he could be employed, only one who would pay him for the object he seeks.”

  “You suspect…?” He did not need to finish the sentence, he and the old woman both knew of whom they spoke.

  Briseida considered a moment, and sighed, echoing their thoughts. “Artifice.”

  Goya looked again at Ian.

  “The signs continue,” he said sadly.

  She nodded, adding, “As does my hope.”

  Chapter 18: Always in Motion

  In the morning, Cousins and Ian had already left, leaving Rom and Kari alone to help Briseida with breakfast and the morning chores. Rom and Kari had spoken until they had both fallen asleep, and had explained to one another the events of the evening.

  Kari took another look at Rom’s bracelet. “So, basically, the staff comes out, you hit things with it and they die,” she oversimplified.

  “Well, it’s not that easy,” she muttered. “But, I guess, yeah. And I can jump really, really far.”

  “You already did that,” Kari observed, thinking back to Rom’s exploits in the orphanage.

  “No, I can jump over buildings now!”

  “No!”

  “Yes,” Rom blushed.

  “Truly?”

  “Truly.”

  Kari’s jaw dropped. “That’s wonderful!”

  Rom grinned. “It kind of is,” she confessed.

  Mulligan looked up from his small bowl of fruit to observe the two girls. His whiskers flicked randomly and he resumed eating.

  “And all that music you were hearing,” Rom asked, “that was Art?”

  Kari nodded cheerfully.

  “That’s really strange. But at least you don’t have a glowing purple thing in your head.”

  “I think it’s beautiful!” Kari protested. “It makes you look like an angel. It’s like, I can only hear Art. But you are Art.”

  Rom stubbornly tried not to agree, but secretly she did think it was rather wonderful. The thoughts of the milli
pede as it died clung to her, tainting the image of the angel as Kari described it – from the harvester to the reaper. She sighed, concealing the expression by taking a mouthful of food.

  After they cleaned up from breakfast, Briseida walked the girls through the basics of operating the shop – from prices to what sorts of things were which, how to lock the door and set the wards. About an hour after they had opened the apothecary for business, three people came into the shop, all three wearing grayish-blue long coats with a copper-colored patch on the left lapel.

  The patches were all the same – a complex arrangement of gears in a roughly triangular pattern, with the two moons and the sun at the corners. Kari recognized it instantly.

  “You’re from the college of Atmology!” Kari screamed, quite a bit louder than she would have liked, were she to have the chance to do it over.

  The two men and the woman smiled kindly, nodding. The older gentleman – whose scant remaining hair was solid grey and long, sticking out at random intervals – bowed cordially at the waist.

  “We are indeed, Miss,” he said. Looking at them both and finally at Briseida, he added, “We are here to see a potential by the name of … Kari, is it?”

  Kari jumped up, once before she could stop herself. “That’s me!” she said excitedly.

  Briseida put her hands on Kari’s shoulders. “Yes, dear, these are the people I said would be here to speak with you today. Please escort them into the guest’s parlor, would you?” She tightened her grip only slightly, adding, “And please do try not to bring the building down in your enthusiasm.”

  Kari bit her lip. “I’ll try,” she half-grinned.

  She showed the three scientists into the other room, leaving Briseida and Rom alone in the shop. Briseida took the opportunity to watch Rom as Rom alternated her gaze between the direction Kari and the others had gone and staring vacantly out the front window.