Steampunk Tales, Volume 1

by Ren Cummins

  Holding tightly to her shoulder, Mulligan spoke into her ear to be heard above the air rushing past them. “I never trusted that man,” he growled.

  “Neither do I,” Rom answered. “But…” her voice trailed off. She remembered something an old friend of hers had once said: “In a city of killers, trust the thief.”

  “You think maybe he’ll have news from Cousins or Kari?” Mulligan asked her.

  She skidded to a stop on the last building before the maglev track. “Yeah. Maybe.” She bit her lip, wrestling once more with the turmoil of conscience at having left her friends two years earlier without so much as a goodbye. Rom was sure they hated her by now; they might even have forgotten about her. She wouldn’t have blamed them.

  A faint hum preceded the train; she pushed away thoughts of the home in which she had been raised, and her two closest friends who remained on the far side of the great Wall. As the control car passed her, she launched herself up and over the empty street, half-turning in the middle of her arc to brace for the landing. Mulligan tightened his grip on her shoulder – even though she’d become very good at jumping aboard the trains, there’d been a pretty sharp learning curve – his right wing still ached a bit with painful memories of her initial failures.

  Her boots slipped a bit on the slick surface, but she dropped low and took hold of a metal groove that ran the length of the top of the cars, bringing their momentum to an abrupt halt. Mulligan sighed deeply.

  “See?” she teased him. “You worry too much.”

  Mulligan’s yellow eyes looked towards the tower that Favo Carr, the enigmatic and charismatic scoundrel he was, had indicated. It was a pale grey in contrast to the stark white coloration of the royal palace, and was unadorned by the pageantry and visual fanfare of its nearest neighbor. A frown wrinkled across his catlike face, his grumblings went unheard by his friend.

  “Perhaps you don’t worry enough.”

  Chapter 3: Dreams and Decisions

  The city had not been anything like she’d expected – she marveled at the many differences between the two communities; that of Oldtown where she’d been raised, and the much larger Aesirium. Even after two years, the image of its segmented boroughs and dizzying edifices never failed to amaze her. The shortest of Aesirium’s buildings was still at least twice again the tallest building of Oldtown-Against-the-Wall – for their limited resources and prohibitive height restrictions they simply couldn’t construct high enough to match these erected marvels. It saddened Rom to think that just a few kilometers to the west and over the eponymous Wall that kept the people of Oldtown in an enforced exile, thousands of people lived, deprived of the astonishing technologies that most here in Aesirium took for granted.

  Rom’s crossing of the Wall broke one of the most essential laws in Oldtown – but though she had managed to mingle among them and be accepted as one of their own, it was only through an extreme focus of will that she managed to not have her breath taken away at every sight and sound of this city. The majority of the citizens here wandered in underwhelmed acceptance bordering on apathy at the brilliant designs and defiance of gravity itself which threatened to engulf Rom in sensory overload. The challenge with mingling among so divergent a people involved knowing the differences and being able to find one’s way among them.

  However, understanding the differences had required Rom to indulge in a practice which had never come easily to her: studying.

  She had secreted herself away for much of the first few months in a storage room of a records loft – not much more than a crawlspace above a university – sneaking out when necessary, but spending as much time as possible rummaging through the information she found there in leather and steel-bound books. Most of it she regarded as useless, but eventually she found a crate filled with student journals – wherein she gleaned the most of her knowledge about the current state of the city.

  Oldtown, for the past few hundreds of years – according to the teachings of the Matrons in the orphanage where she had been raised – had sought to develop itself under the simple premise that science and art were two fundamental energies, the balanced use of which helped them to grow and develop in a harmonious relationship with Aerthos itself. As a result of primal philosophical differences, the founding fathers of Oldtown were cast out of Aesirium, there to eke out a basic life without threat to the burgeoning mindset of the rest of the populace. The Great Wall which had originally been constructed for simple defense, now served as a buttress against the ideas which, according to the governing people of Aesirium, might otherwise infect, weaken and potentially destroy the delicate structure within. Beneath that illusory aspiration of a better, more pure life, was the reality that certain studies and practices were not just undesirable, but were crimes which could result in the most horrific punishments imaginable.

  So, while the people of Oldtown struggled to maintain even the barest of necessities, the people within the Wall grew and prospered. Uninhibited by the attacks of the wild undead beasts from beyond Oldtown’s agricultural fields, Aesirium’s scientific advances grew at an almost exponential rate. Whereas both groups had once been founded upon the principles of the energy potential in water and steam, Aesirium had taken that to an almost molecular level. Rom had only recently discovered the term “molecule”, and caught herself thinking wistfully of her friend Kari and the expression she might have had to discover Rom learning more about steam than she.

  The train shifted onto an alternate track; Rom placed her left hand on the slight curve of the roof to keep her balance. Mulligan lifted his head from her shoulder to look out onto the skyline.

  “We missed our turnoff,” he said.

  Rom frowned. “Sorry, I was… I wasn’t thinking.” She rose to a crouch as a train headed towards them in the opposite direction.

  “Sure you were,” he said. “Just not about where we were going.”

  “Hush,” she frowned again. The opposing train rushed by them with an alternate gust of wind and a loud burst of noise from the conflicting motion. Rom spun and launched herself from the roof of the train they had been riding and onto the new one. It was travelling only slightly faster than she now was, so she had to run a few paces to match it completely before bracing herself against the change of momentum.

  “I hate it when you do that, Rom,” Mulligan muttered to her. “Makes me want to cough something up - - only I haven’t eaten yet tonight, as you may recall.”

  The train merged back onto the main line. Rom saw their destination – a low building whose roof was only a half-floor above the monorail. She leapt casually up and over the ledge and slid to a gentle stop on the rooftop. Opening a small access hatch, she hopped down, letting it slap shut behind her. The hatch was built into the end of a small corridor which extended further into the building’s central hallways, but in this particular area there were only two doors. Built as it was, this building’s side had few residents – the next building over was so close as to make it undesirable, so most of the rooms on this side were either vacant or used as storage. But for Rom, who liked the freedom to come and go as she pleased, it was perfect.

  She reached into one of her dresses’ pockets and pulled out a small key ring, as well as the other key she had just received earlier in the evening. Looking at the new key for an extra moment, she unlocked her room and walked in. Once inside, Mulligan hopped from her shoulder, his wings flapping energetically to keep him aloft as he went to the metal box near her sink next to the cupboards. He pulled the door of the box open and began helping himself to a pre-packaged meal of seasoned fish and rice and sliced yellow vegetables.

  Rom clipped the new key onto her key ring as she locked the door behind her. A small messaging tube at the far end of the single room remained empty. It was just as well, she thought. She was too tired to go into work tonight, anyway.

  Work, she thought with a sigh, collapsing on the metal-framed bed. It complained with a loud creak as she settled into it, shoes and all.

&nb
sp; Mulligan closed the icebox with a swish of his tail, and lowered the bottle of milk from his mouth to regard her. His whiskers flickered.

  He watched her back rise and fall with several slow, deep breaths. Setting the bottle on a stool that doubled, for him, as a table, he walked across the floor towards her, tiny feet padding across the wooden surface. At the bed, he rose up onto his hind paws to look at her at eyelevel.

  “Rom?” he asked. “Talk to me, please. What’s wrong?” He paused, but she did not respond. “Thinking about Kari and everyone?”

  Another pause, followed by a muffled answer: “Do you think they hate me? Or do you suppose they’ve forgotten about me by now?”

  He hopped up on the bed beside her – she responded by rolling over on her side to look at him. “I’ve been here for so long, and I still can’t find a way to get to Artifice. I can’t even get to the Queen, and she’s just a person!” She bit her bottom lip. “I should never have come here. I left everything I had behind, and I’ve got nothing here, either.”

  Mulligan’s ears shifted as he cleared his throat.

  Rom smiled slightly. “You know what I mean. I just...” She sighed, sitting back up on the bed and scratching his ears by way of an apology. “I just wish I could’ve accomplished something in all this time. Something useful.”

  “Well,” Mulligan offered, “tonight wasn’t a total loss.”

  “No, I guess not. We did find a whole new kind of weird dead thing, though he almost beat me.”

  “I was talking about Favo,” Mulligan said, nudging her hand to keep her petting his head.

  “Ugh. I know, he’s trouble, you’ve said it before.” She shook her head, reaching up with her free hand to shake her white hair free. It was still damp from the rain, but she was reminded of how long it had gotten. Self-consciously, she pulled the front hair low over her forehead. The city had people who could cut her hair for her, but she tried to conceal the two purple gems that were embedded in the center of her forehead and marked her for what she was. She saw women with their elegant and beautiful hairstyles, while she was forced to keep her hair its unnatural stark white color in simple cut which Mulligan helped her perform on herself every month or so. It was usually straight, but she mostly kept the bulk of it drawn behind her head as often as possible beneath a small scarf or headband to hide the gently glowing gems. “It was good to see him, again, though.”

  Rom turned to regard her reflection in the window. Seeing Favo tonight reminded her of how her life had been only two years before. Her pale blue eyes had seemed larger then, lighter and without the faint dark smudges caused from a too much worry and not enough sleep; her cheeks had been rounder, her chin softer and less angled. It felt to her as if her time here in Aesirium had taken away so many of the things that marked her as a child, replacing them each with the apparent elements of a young woman. She sighed, her efforts to reconcile the Romany she saw in the window with the one she remembered.

  Her eyes closed. They felt warm, heavy, and on the brink of tears.

  “Just rest for now, Rom,” Mulligan whispered. “I’ll keep a watch out, and I’ll let you know if anything comes in on the aethernet.” He nodded back towards the tube in the corner, which remained vacant.

  Rom wanted to protest, but she could feel it. Her exhaustion was more than physical – she really hadn’t done much during the night, even including her fight with that sand-like person. The realization flickered past her mind as she slipped into slumber that was fueled by pure exhaustion, from carrying too much responsibility for too long. With that observation, along with her helplessness in contesting it, she fell into a calm and relaxing depth of shadow.

  Chapter 4: The Persistence of Memory

  Her eyelids fluttered. It was brighter than she was expecting it to be – was she expecting it? She couldn’t quite remember. Beside her on the sun-warmed grass was a large, dark-blue leonine beast, its tremendous wings folded against his torso. It looked down at her and seemed to smile – although it would have been simple to mistake those rows of sharp teeth for something else. But in her mind, she knew it was an expression of being glad to see her.

  Distantly, she felt a connection to the creature, and leaped to her feet so she could throw her arms around the thick mane around his neck.

  “Yu!” she said, only then realizing it was the creature’s name.

  The deep warmth of his voice purred back to her. “Romany,” he replied. “It is good that you are here.”

  She opened her eyes and released him. “I feel… funny,” she said. Her fingers plucked at her dress, which was cleaner and appeared more frilly than she recalled.

  He nodded. “You always need a moment to remember,” he reminded her. “This is the world of the spirit, and you must pull your memories like dreams back from the other side.”

  His words sounded distinctly familiar to her, unleashing in her mind a sense that she could trust this creature, and she responded by closing her eyes and searching her mind as if seeking a door in an unlit room. At last, she felt her mind fix upon a single patch of thoughts, and slowly unwrap them – sending them streaming across her dreaming mind.

  She shook her head – an unnecessary if not poignant act. “Thank you, Yu, that’s better now.”

  Beside him sat a smaller creature, coming up to just below Rom’s waist – pale yellow with soft green stripes and a long arching neck. A single horn extended only a hand’s-length from the end of her snout, and tiny shining scales gleamed from beneath a thin coat of fur.

  “Terenaa!” Rom exclaimed, crouching to greet her other friend. Though less powerful than Yu, Terenaa was much faster, and was possessed of other useful attributes that had helped Rom in the past.

  While she carefully stroked Terenaa’s neck, she looked up at Yu. “I was just talking about coming back here – only, I didn’t bring myself here at all.” A dark thought crossed her mind. “I’m not dead, am I?”

  “No, Romany,” Terenaa smiled.

  Relieved, Rom nodded, mentally checking things off her list. “Who brought me? Is something wrong?”

  Yu’s mighty head slowly moved from side to side. “No, Romany,” he said. “Although it has been many months since you have come, something has happened that… she wanted you to see.”

  “Memory?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  Rom bit her lip, and stood slowly, smoothing the wrinkles from her dress.

  “Is she still mad at me?”

  Terenaa nudged Rom’s leg. “She was never mad at you.”

  “It felt like she was.”

  “Not angry,” Terenaa insisted.

  “Concerned,” Yu clarified. His eyes looked away from Rom’s face to regard something in the distance. When Rom looked, she could feel it, too.

  “Yes, she’s there,” Rom said.

  Terenaa climbed Rom’s dress to curl across her shoulders and beneath her hair, which, here in the world of spirit, was shorter and curled, descending just below her shoulders in large ringlets. Rom then pulled herself up onto Yu’s back. A low rumble of thunder echoed in the east, washing over them in random intervals. The sky, however, was a clear and brilliant azure.

  “Force keeping her distracted?” Rom asked, pointing a thumb in the general direction of the thunder.

  “For the time being,” Terenaa explained. Yu’s strong legs kicked out, and his wings unfurled to take them swiftly from the serene meadow and across the smooth surface of a nearby lake until they came to a house built into the side of a hill. A tall woman with lovely golden hair stood at the entrance as they landed.

  In spite of the concerned she’d expressed only moment earlier, Rom’s fears were instantly dismissed at the sight of Memory’s face. The only expression evident there was the concern and affection she felt for Rom. Her embrace was warm and sincere.

  After too short a time, her grip loosened. “We haven’t much time,” she said to Rom in a voice filled with regret. “Artifice has of late gained a great deal of st
rength, and we have much to discuss.”

  The taller woman led the young Rom inside, while Yu and Terenaa waited outside. The interior was much the same is always was – a careful mix of form and function, with instruments of art and music sitting beside utilitarian furniture, while other pieces of ornate craftsmanship sat mostly unused at seemingly random spacing along the walls. Above these hung delicate frames of a variety of designs, the paintings in which swirled and swam in a dizzying shifting pattern.

  Memory gestured to a chair in the middle of the room, while she took her place on the bench directly opposite.

  “First,” Memory began, “although I am very gladdened to see you again, it has been fortunate that you have stayed away. Artifice has discovered our home nearly a dozen times since you have been here last, and she has clearly grown dramatically more vigilant in either attempting to destroy or capture us, or to simply remove us as aid to you in your development.”

  “Does that happen much?” Rom asked. “I mean, I’m still new, but I haven’t become really all powerful or anything.”

  Memory smiled. “No, though indeed you have learned much and quickly. But the progress of a Sheharid Is’iin is difficult to predict. Once I had fully embraced my own path, I did not increase in power to any notable degree; at least not in the dramatic leaps Artifice has presented. Although, she is certainly more obvious in her quest for power, which may play a part in this.”

  “This realization forces us both to accept two specific truths, Romany,” she said. “First, I must remind you that you have still yet to uncover your own individual path, and define your nature as a Sheharid Is’iin. And,” Memory quickly added, seeing Rom was about to interrupt, “although I know you will now, tell me once again that you do not yet know where to look to find it, I will remind you that you have still yet to seek it anywhere, much less in places you would expect.”